10 Best Cloud Logging Tools in 2022

Cloud Logging is a set of practices allowing you to centralize and manage logs from sources on the cloud. It allows you to collect, correlate and analyze logs from all-over your stack and identify bottlenecks, measure performance and tweak the configuration.

Why do you need logs from your Cloud?

Logs are essential for cloud monitoring, measuring, predicting, and optimizing your cloud architecture’s performance, security and help you operate sustainably over time. Ideally, you should collect transaction logs, event logs, message logs, and audit logs.

Benefits of using a Log Management Solution

Nowadays, even the easiest projects use multiple tools, and with growing complexity, the amount of generated logs grows proportionally. To stay on top of your logs from applications, servers, databases, networks, you will need help. Also, a good log management tool will help you make sure that you meet any compliance requirements or agreements, which will help you protect your good name but could also save you a lot of money.

Having a log manager for your clouds is de facto cheaper, but make sure you keep an eye on the underlying costs, such as infrastructure costs, that could occur if your operation grows.

The Best Cloud Logging tools in 2022

The ever-growing tech world made a lot of things easier. However, logging has become more complex than ever, especially when using multiple cloud architectures. That’s why tools that can organize such huge amounts of data in a logical and comprehensible fashion are needed. Let’s take a look at the best Cloud Logging Software and Tools in 2022.

1. Logtail

Logtail is a complete log management solution from Better Stack, allowing you to collect, transport, analyze, monitor, store, and archive logs from all over your cloud architecture.

By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, or AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring. Thanks to custom-built technology and data stored in 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.

Logtail allows you to query your logs the same way you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. Logtail 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.

One of the greatest benefits of Logtail is built-in collaboration features, where you can cooperate with your colleagues in a google docs-like environment, save, share, and archive parts of code, and collaborate with your colleagues.

Tighter security is one of the main benefits of log monitoring, and Logtail 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.

Main Benefits of Logtail:

• Inexpensive and extremely efficient ClickHouse based storage
• Integration with Better Uptime, enabling even better observability and incident management
• Pricing starts at $0.25/GB

2. Sematext Cloud

Sematext Cloud offers a cloud logging solution within its monitoring platform. Sematext Cloud allows you to monitor Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud services and easily integrates with most Cloud and Container Platforms.

It uses Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for collecting and transforming data, searching, filtering and analyzing, and finally, data managing and visualization. You can troubleshoot faster using real-time alerting on both metrics and logs. Log analyzing and looking for anomalies make the whole process quicker. You can integrate it with email, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, BigPanda, OpsGenie, VictorOps, WebHooks, Nagios, Zapier, and more.

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.

Main Benefits of Sematext:

• 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

3. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic offers a cloud logging platform as a part of their log management solution. 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.

See more similar tools to Sumo Logic.

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 offers a cloud logging service as a part of their Log management solution. Loggly is a SaaS-based cloud logging, aggregation, and analytics service from SolarWinds. You can forward logs to Loggly using Syslog and you can manage log aggregation using simple scripts. Loggly is a SaaS-based cloud logging service from SolarWinds.

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, 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. Datadog

Datadog Log Management offers Logging without Limits - a solution for collection, processing, storage, exploration, and monitoring of your logs. Their Log Explorer allows you to Search, Observe in Real-time, Analyse, Spot Patterns, and Save Views of your Logs.

You can collect metrics from your cloud services and visualize them in one place, using drag-and-drop customizable dashboards. Datadog also allows you to isolate query performance issues and eliminate hold-ups at the DBA level by managing multiple databases at once. Datadog's deployment is easy and quick and does not require any extensive training.

Main Benefits of Datadog:

• IoT add-ons
• Custom Metrics in Higher tiers
• Full-stack observability and monitoring achievable

6. Papertrail

Papertrail is yet another cloud-based log management tool. You can use it to Aggregate logs, tail, and search using a browser, CLI, or API, create alerts or integrate it with other SolarWinds’ products such as AppOptics.

Papertrail aggregates logs from multiple sources such as syslog, txt log files, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Windows event, Cloud hosting, Tomcat, Apache, Heroku apps, and more.

Papertrail is available for free with 48 hours period and a 7 days archive period. Its free plan allows you to work with only 50MB of data/month. Their premium plans depend on the amount of data you want to ingest and search availability and storage, their pricing starts at $7/GB.

Main Benefits of Papertrail:

• SolarWinds’ backing allows you to integrate with other solutions

7. New Relic

New Relic's Log Management allows you to instantly search through logs, visualize them, use logging data to create custom charts, dashboards, and alerts, and troubleshoot any emerging issues within one platform. Log collection uses its infrastructure monitoring agent.

If you prefer to go agentless, you can forward Syslog data to a TCP endpoint. New Relic supports both on-premise and cloud data. New Relics benefits from machine learning to detect performance patterns, mark those logs, and create clusters based on correlations that are easy to query, visualize, analyze or use for alerting.

Visualization is handled by the Logs UI, allowing you to spot patterns that could benefit you in software tweaking or observing logs in context. Logs can be explored and manipulated using filters and parsing rules. Data is split into partitions to optimize query performance. Alerting options are available and help prevent any unwanted events.

Main benefits of New Relic

• All-in-one infrastructure monitoring tool
• Open Source projects available
• Pay-as-you-go pricing model

8. LogDNA

LogDNA is a log management solution allowing you to collect and analyze logs from multiple sources. 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. Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Amazon Cloudwatch Logs is a solution allowing you to monitor, store and access log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS CloudTrail, Route 53, and more sources. Using Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you can query data using their purpose-built query language. It provides sample queries, command descriptions, query autocompletion, and log field discovery to ease the onboarding process. Cloudwatch Logs can track the number of errors that occur in your application logs and send you a notification whenever any monitored rate exceeds a threshold.

Using CloudWatch Logs, you can create CloudWatch alerts, store logs for an unlimited amount of time, archive logs in highly durable storage, and access the raw log data.

Main Benefits of CloudWatch Logs:

• Native Amazon Solution
• Integration with other Amazon tools

10. Google Cloud Logging

Google Cloud Logging is a fully managed log management solution enabling you to store, analyze and create alerts. Its Logs Explorer enables you to view logs from Google Cloud Services in the Console. Google Cloud Logging’s Log Analytics powered by BigQuery provides you with deep operational insights and Regional Log Buckets help you to stay compliant with both regional and industry regulations.

Google Cloud Logging allows you to ingest data from hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It uses the Cloud Logging API to receive log entries as they pass via the Log Router. The Log Router checks each log against existing filters in order to discard unnecessary noise. Its error reporting capacities automatically analyze your logs for abnormalities and exceptions and merge them into groups. Using Log buckets and views you can store your logs and thanks to Logs archival you can export your logs into Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Logging starts at $0.5/GiB.

Main Benefits of Google Cloud Logging:

• A wide variety of Google Cloud Courses makes onboarding easier
• A tool made by Google

Conclusion

In this article, we tried to underline the importance of Cloud Logging, and more importantly, proper handling of Cloud logs and how they could benefit your operation. Then we went over a list of the Best Cloud Logging Tools in 2022.