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Add to SafariWhen comparing Logstash vs Sentry, 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 Sentry is ranked 2nd. 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 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
Pro Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy
It's what Sentry calls [Rollups](https://docs.sentry.io/learn/rollups/]. All individual issues rolled-up can still be drilled down. Also two issues can be merged manually.
Pro Email/Slack/GitHub/Hipchat integration
Newly discovered issues (i.e. one that isn't rolled-up under and existing one) can generate an instant notification via many means.
Pro Has an official Docker image
Sentry has an official Docker image which means it's likely going to be well reviewed and maintained for a while and it makes it easy to set up.
Pro Completely open source, with a hosted version available
Sentry is a completely open source tool. It's free to use if you want to run it on your own. If you want to avoid the overhead of running and maintaining another server, it also has a hosted version available at www.getsentry.com
Pro Source maps support
Has support for source maps.
Pro Can create projects and teams
A single Sentry server can be used for various teams/products.
Cons
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.
Con Not really a logging solution
Sentry collects exceptions, it's not a solution for log aggregation.
Con Can't filter by browser versions
Sentry only filters by browser names and not by browser versions (for example: Firefox, instead of Firefox 27, Firefox 28 etc...)
Con No free cloud hosting
Unfortunately there is no free plan for cloud hosted solution. Only self-hosted solutions are free to use.
