Log messages contain useful information to help organizations trace issues such as abnormalities, unauthorized end-user behavior, and other activities deviating from usual standards and benchmarks. These log messages are often termed as event logs and are collected and archived for analysis. Analyzing these event logs helps users understand patterns and trends in activity within the infrastructure and identify potential threats. Log management tools are a necessity—they can provide users with capabilities like centralized log management, automated log summaries, active monitoring, custom retention periods, anomaly detection, and automated parsing, amongst other features.
In this blog, we will outline two important log management tools and compare them against some of their key features. To begin, let’s understand the tools.
Logz.io
Logz.io is an open-source log management platform based on Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK). Users can easily correlate with metrics as it helps monitor with Grafana and troubleshoots in Kibana. It also helps find recurring patterns in log data and streamline troubleshooting. Its machine learning and crowdsourcing feature lets users uncover otherwise overlooked events, while the live tail feature allows to view a live feed of data streamed from multiple sources. Users can also dynamically update elastic search field mapping via a dedicated UI.
Loggly
A log file can answer many questions and help identify problems early on. SolarWinds® Loggly® is an intelligent log monitoring tool that allows users to monitor and investigate the issues and fix them beforehand. It offers fast and powerful search capabilities over vast volumes of log data. Enterprises wanting to cut costs by reducing their total cost of ownership (TCO) can benefit from multi-tenant SaaS, which provides a safe, fast, scalable, and available solution. With Loggly, companies can see the performance of applications running on various infrastructures such as AWS, Microsoft, hybrid cloud, and microservices, and monitor threats and critical resources to find the root cause of issues. Loggly integrates with multiple tools such as Slack, HipChat, Jira, and others, so IT teams can share tickets, distribute alerts, and share deeper log insights between tools. Loggly also simplifies investigation and KPI reporting with its interactive dashboards and unified log viewer. Users can collaborate by sharing one or more dashboards across teams and share log reports in PNG format.
Now let’s discuss some features of both these tools in-depth.
Alerting Mechanism
Logz.io provides flexibility to customize alerts based on Kibana queries and configure the exact trigger conditions. It notifies users to signals and bugs and sends alerts on external threats, irregular behavior, or unusual resource usage. Kibana querying lets users recognize or identify specific events. Users can also customize alert formats by grouping and aggregating options by fields. This helps get accurate and concise alerts.
Loggly helps phase out performance issues before they can cause service disruption. It lets users have a continuous and proactive view of performance across applications, services, and infrastructure. Users can quickly spot patterns across interrelated services, issues, and events and send log dashboards to team members via email, HipChat, or Slack. Its command center view lets users optimize dashboards for display by letting them resize or arrange charts as needed. Loggly catches regular data patterns and pinpoints divergence. This helps users uncover abnormalities before they become a threat. Users can create alerts in Loggly based on search patterns, thresholds for specific log metrics, and other conditions and include a direct link to the events within Loggly. Alerts are shareable via HipChat, Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, or webhook-compatible notification service. Loggly offers to keep users alert and ahead of potential dangers.
ELK Apps
Logz.io ELK apps are a ready-to-use agglomeration of Kibana objects, including searches, alerts, visualizations, and dashboards designed to save users time. It provides over five hundred different visualizations and dashboards for various log types, including AWS, Docker, Apache, and IIS. Users can deploy required objects in Kibana with a single click and contribute their dashboards. Loggly offers a cost-effective substitute to ELK stack where users don’t need to define their Elasticsearch topology or manage aspects like indices, cluster shape, shards, or heap. Loggly makes it easy for users to manage their business—it can handle spikes from managing log data.
Customer Data Security
Logz.io provides an exclusive data store for every customer, which helps ensure data protection. It tags, segregates, and tunnels through its data ingestion mechanism. When data is in transit in the ingestion pipeline, it marks it with specific information, including customer name. It supports SSL encryption for data in transit, which helps customers safely upload data to the Logz.io cloud. It encrypts and hosts cold data in separate simple storage service (S3) buckets secured by robust AES 256-bit encryption.
Loggly safeguards customer data using Transport Layer Security (TLS). It encrypts data using the latest SHA-256 certificate and offers safe endpoints for both syslog and HTTPS. Loggly endpoints require a unique customer token distinct to each account. These tokens allow customers to ingest data only from reliable and dependable sources. Loggly also enables users to retire compromised tokens and allows filtering out data containing sensitive information before it leaves the customer’s premises. This can be done either via the application, syslog daemon, or logging agent. It also offers configuration examples for scrubbing data matching specific patterns, configuring collectors with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers, and logging data from browsers while protecting end users from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Loggly is a good choice for data security as it provides role-based access controls and helps demonstrate PCI, HIPAA, and EU Data Protection regulatory compliance.
Conclusion
Choosing a log management tool can be difficult for organizations. Companies should have a thorough understanding of both tools discussed in this blog before investing. They should also check out the free trial versions of tools. Though Logz.io offers various log management capabilities, Loggly is safe, scales dynamically, and lets users monitor, analyze, and optimize applications running on dynamic infrastructures like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, hybrid clouds, microservices, devices, and IoT. Users can also distribute alerts and create tickets.