10 Best Sematext Logs Alternatives in 2024

Sematext Cloud offers a Log Management and Analysis solution. Sematext Logs is a hosted ELK stack in the Cloud, without the hassle that comes with hosting your own ELK stack and infrastructure.

It allows you to use a log shipper of your choice including Logstash, Filebeat, Logagent, rsyslog, and more. Sematext Logs correlates logs with other metrics and offers log analysis and performance monitoring alongside RUM in one application. You can also benefit from Sematext’s alerting capacities allowing you to aggregate, alert, and analyze log data, in real-time. Queries can be saved as an alert and then sent as notifications to your favorite communication or incident management platforms.

Sematext runs on AWS, an infrastructure that follows strict IT security best practices. Your logs are encrypted via HTTPS and sent through TLS/SLL channels. You can also restrict specific permissions to some members of your team.

Pros:

• It brings infrastructure and application performance monitoring together with log management
• Easy to use with good pre-configured dashboards and reports thus also quick to start
• No need for a lengthy configuration

Cons:

• ELK stack-based log management can still get quite expensive
• The UI feels neglected and outdated and also encounters some performance-related issues -

10 Best Sematext Logs Alternatives in 2023

Sematext offers a good Log Management Solution, but there are a lot of solutions offering better functionality, documentation, and more features.

1. Better Stack

Unlike Sematext, Better Stack is using ClickHouse instead of the ELK stack what allows it to perform much faster and manage resources with more efficience. All that makes Better Stack more reliable and cheaper at the same time. Better Stack also offers SQL-compatibile query and advanced collaboration features allowing you to save and comment important parts of logs.

Better Stack allows you to search & filter petabytes of logs in a moment and set an anomaly detection alert to receive alerts when your logs become out of the ordinary.

By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring. Thanks to custom-built technology and ClickHouse, you can work with your logs more efficiently and save funds. All the collected data are sent to Grafana for comprehensive visualization and more efficient intel management.

Tighter security is one of the main priorities in log monitoring, and Better Stack itself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard best practices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001 certifications, your data is safe during both transit and storage.

If you need a log monitoring solution for your hobby project, Better Stack is available for free. You get access to 1 GB of storage a month, with 3-day data retention. For $24/month, you get access to the Freelancer package, with 30 GB of log storage and 15-day data retention.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• A one-click filter of logs in a structured format
• Better Stack Uptime integration for a full-stack monitoring solution
• Advanced collaboration features

2. Logentries

Logentries by Rapid7 offers a centralized log data solution allowing you to centralize log streams from distributed machines, networks, devices, and applications. Logentries offers both agent and agentless collection of logs. It allows you to search, aggregate, and visualize log data in one place. In case of any issues, Logentries enables you to use aggregated live tail to see what is happening in real-time and troubleshoot faster.

Logentries collects logs automatically, in any format and type from multiple platforms including Windows, OSx, Linux, Mobile, and cloud PaaS and IaaS.

Logentries offers only one transparent subscription model, starting at $48/month for 30GB of logs.

Main Benefits of Logentries:

• Rapid7 ecosystem of solutions

3. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a complete set of log management tools for the entire stack, whether cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. Centralized data visualization allows you to spot developing trends and disarm any errors before they occur or during damage control, finding the root cause faster. Thanks to anomaly detection, outlier detection, and predictive analytics, you get deep and comprehensive insights into your architecture's performance. Sumo logic offers real-time visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud applications and infrastructure. Alongside that, you get access to over 150 apps and native integrations to get full out-of-the-box visibility into third-party technologies.

Sumo Logic provides you with two dashboards - a live dashboard and an interactive one. The live dashboard offers numerous real-time data in the order as they come. However, it doesn't provide an option to look back at the older data. That's where the interactive dashboard comes in. In the interactive dashboard, you can view a complete overview of events and trends, focus on the graphs and identify rare events. You can filter for the specific errors and exceptions to be able to focus on them in the future.

However it's plans come at quite a significant cost compared to Sematext.

Main Benefits of Sumo Logic:

• A free limited version is provided to you to test out the service
• It allows you to ingest the logs from your network directly and in real-time
• The application also offers extensive REST API
• GUI is easy to grasp, thus making it quicker to start

4. Loggly

Loggly is a log management and aggregation tool from SolarWinds. It is currently one of the most commonly used solutions on the market. Loggly is an agentless log analyzer gathering data directly from application servers. Using a token, or the standard Syslog with HTTP(s), Loggly can retrieve data from pre-existing software.

It can work with txt based logs from any source and support multiple languages and platforms. We can find support for Ruby, Java, Python JavaScript, PHP, Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat, MySQL, Syslog-ng, rsyslog, and many more. Loggly's primary focus is on solving and fixing operational problems. Customizable dashboards, documentation, and a vast array of useful tools make Loggly a powerful log analyzing tool.

Main Benefits of Loggly:

• SolarWinds Backing

5. Papertrail

Papertrail aggregates and analyses logs from a variety of sources that come in different types. That includes syslogs, .txt log files, Apache, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Windows Events, Tomcat, Heroku, or logs from apps, routers, or firewalls.

Logs are scanned for any anomalies or deviations, and if needed, real-time alerts and summaries are displayed. Papertrail offers support for multiple languages and platforms, including Angular, Linux Logging Software and Log Management, Ruby, NGINX, MySQL, Javascript, HAproxy, and Golang. With the ability to create per-user access control protocols, you do not compromise consistency or data security and integrity by giving access to multiple team members.

You can get Papertrail for free with 48 hours search window, seven days archive, and a 16 GB first month bonus followed by a 50 MB/month quota. If you are looking for paid packages, Papertrail's bundles start at $7/month.

Main Benefits of Papertrail:

• Solarwinds backing
• Cron Job Monitoring

6. Datadog

Datadog’s log management allows you to gain complete visibility into cloud-scale infrastructure. It is capable of aggregating metrics and events from over 500 integrated technologies, tag and store them. Using Datadog’s Log Management, you can collect, search, and analyze logs, and then correlate them using specific traces, metric spikes, or security signals. Datadog also takes care of ingestion, normalization and enrichment of logs.

Datadog’s Log management is also capable of identifying potential threats, discover misconfigurations and monitor your logs using threshold and anomaly detection. On top of that, you can monitor the security of all layers of your cloud environment. Datadog tracks the performance impact of every code deployed and automatically maps data flows and dependencies with the service map.

Main Benefits of Datadog:

• Full-observability achievable
• Security monitoring capacities

7. Calyptia

Calyptia is an enterprise-ready log management tool based on the open-source tool Fluentd.

FlutentD is an open-source data collector unifying data collection and consumption enabling you to manage your logs in a more comprehensible and consistent way. Fluentd structures data as JSON as much as possible, allowing you to collect, filter, buffer, and output logs. It offers a flexible plugin system allowing its community to extend its use. Fluentd has a rich community developers community, which gave birth to more than 500 community-contributed plugins allowing you to connect dozens of data sources and data outputs.

Fluentd is written in a combination of C and Ruby, requires very little system resources (approximately 40MB of memory in the vanilla version), and offers an even more lightweight version - Fluent Bit. Nowadays, more than 2000 data-driven companies use Fluentd.

Main Benefits of Calyptia:

• Community developed plugins
• Lightweight solution

8. LogDNA

LogDNA parses major log line types on ingestion and offers Custom Parsing Templates. You can filter your logs based on app, host, or cluster, browse logs from any source instantly, and search through them with simple keywords, exclusion terms, chained expressions, and data ranges. Alerts are set off based on either Presence or Absence, or generate an alert from a saved View and report on them in PagerDuty, Slack, or with a custom Webhook. LogDNA also allows you to save views to access common Filters and Searches and share them.

LogDNA is built on Elasticsearch, providing you with relatively fast and reliable indexing and filtering of your logs. A web-based GUI handles filtering, logs grouping by source, and more. Visualization and custom dashboards are also available, and you can work with user-specific logs. Agentless log collection via Syslog and HTTP(s) with full-text search and visualizations are available.

LogDNA's pricing packages depend on the retention period in days and the number of users. For starters, you can get LogDNA for free for one user and without any logs retention and unlimited saved views.

Main Benefits of LogDNA:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing model
• Well designed UI

9. Dataset

After the acquisition of Scalyr, SentinelOne launched its own Log Management and Analysis solution - DataSet. It offers Real-Time Insights allowing you to search and analyze logs or Live Tail all data, and create contextual alerts based on anomalies detection. Dataset is a cloud-scale SaaS allowing you to scale as much as you need.

Dataset allows you to unify data from hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, which allows for comprehensive, cross-platform visibility. DataSet also allows you to monitor upstream Kubernetes and managed services such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google Cloud GKE, IBM IKS, Redhat OpenShift, and more.

Dataset also enables you to monitor performance, compliance, and security-related events in one platform. Dataset as of now does not offer regular subscription plans and to get it, you need to contact their sales team.

Main Benefits of Dataset:

• SentinelOne backing
• Enterprise Ready Solution

10. Coralogix

Coralogix enables you to centralize logs, metrics, and security data from all over your stack. After ingestion, data are analyzed, and Coralogix provides you with common trends and patterns that make a further prediction or issues analysis easier. Coralogix automatically parses your logs and enriches the data using their parsing wizard, an automatic parsing for JSON logs. You can enrich logs using a pre-defined, custom data source and add important business, operation, or security information.

Coralogix benefits from Machine Learning and Anomaly Detection. ML algorithms help discover any abnormalities without the need for pre-setting thresholds or other rules. Visualization is made easier thanks to their UI, Kibana, Grafana, SQL clients, Tableau or CLI, and APIs. Coralogix also offers support for multiple syntaxes, including ELK syntax.

Coralogix is an enterprise-ready solution thanks to GDPR, SOC2, PCI, and HIPAA certifications.

Coralogix’s pricing is based on a per GB price and starts at $0.60 for Monitoring Data, $1.80/GB of Frequently Searched Data, and $0.22/GB for compliance data.

Main Benefits of Coralogix:

• ML anomaly detection

Conclusion

This article brought you a closer look at Sematext and its log management solution. It discussed its strengths and weaknesses and then proposed a list of the best alternatives in 2023. By now, it is certain that having a good Log Management solution is a must, so the question is not when should you start, but which tool should you use.