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Add to SafariWhen comparing Loggly vs Logstash, the Slant community recommends Logstash for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Logstash is ranked 1st while Loggly is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Logstash is:
There is an [official Docker image for Logstash](https://hub.docker.com/_/logstash/) which means it'll likely be well supported and maintained for a while.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Automatically captures JavaScript errors
Unlike Airbrake, you don't have to add try/catch blocks to automatically capture JavaScript errors.
Pro Hosted on a CDN already
Unlike Airbrake or LogEntries, you can download the library from GitHub and concatenate/minify it along with your other JS, or you can use it directly from Loggly's CDN.
Pro Supports raw text, syslogs, and JSON
Raw text, syslogs, and JSON can be fed to Loggly.
Pro Easy to set up
You only have to set up a HTTP JSON input and there are community examples to guide you.
Pro Has an official Docker image
There is an official Docker image for Logstash which means it'll likely be well supported and maintained for a while.
Pro Free and open source
Logstash is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Pro Extended functionality via plugins
There is a rich repository of plugins available categorized as inputs, codecs, filters and outputs.
Pro Easy installation
No dependencies, it's a single .jar file. It's written in JRuby and only requires Java to be installed.
Pro Great integration with other Elastic products
Logstash is commonly used as part of ELK stack, that also includes ElasticSearch (a clustered search and storage system) and Kibana (a web frontend for ElasticSearch).
Pro Emphasizes flexibility and interoperability
Logstash is built to fit in your stack.
Pro Filters are code
Filters, also known as "groks", are used to query a log stream. They are provided in a configuration file, that also configures source stream and output streams. Since they are stored in a file, they can be under version control and changes can be reviewed (for example, as part of a Git pull request).
Pro Managed cloud version avaible
There is a cloud based managed version if you are prepared to pay a few bucks.
Pro Good performance
You can run on mediocre system without problems
Cons
Con Expensive
Loggly QUICKLY overflows the 200mb daily free allowance.
Con Difficult to setup
Setup is not easy, the whole process is disjointed, with open source libraries that regularly change and out of date installation instructions.
Con The UI is confusing
The UI is very difficult to use, but it does offer a lot of features.
Con Timestamps are in UTC in the UI, and can't be converted
Loggly shows all timestamps in UTC, and the bookmarklet that's supposed to convert them to local time doesn't work.
Con JavaScript tracker has removed tag support
Con Does not come bundled with a UI
Logstash does not come bundled with a UI, to visualize data you need to use a tool like Kibana or grafana as the UI.
Con Difficult to maintain
You have to host and maintain it yourself. This can be a challenge as log volume increases.
Con Filters can be hard to write
Simple filters seem easy enough with a pattern like %{SYNTAX:SEMANTIC} but often RegEx is required. RegEx is a powerful backdoor but it is also dense and hard to learn.
Con No native alerts
Logstash does not have any native alerting capabilities.
