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Add to SafariWhen comparing Logstash vs Sumo Logic, 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 Sumo Logic is ranked 12th. 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 Scalable
Sumo logic is entirely cloud based and very scalable.
Pro Flexible licensing model
Licensing cost is primarily determined by daily ingest of logs, however this is averaged out over 30 days instead of locking a user out of their own data after an arbitrary number of license breaches.
Pro Truly multi-tenant
Sumo Logic is truly multi-tenant, a single instance running on the server can serve multiple groups of users.
Pro A large set of supporting Apps
Allows customers to quickly setup and start getting actionable insights from their infrastructure by using Apps that integrate with various different platforms out of the box.
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 Useless need for collectors
You have to install a plugin on each host to collect logs, the collector is 89MBs and is written in Java. there's no reason to install a Java tool to send syslog data when Linux already does that natively. The memory footprint for Java-based apps is way too high and, in this case, completely unnecessary.
Con Does not support structured data
They don't support RFC5424 standard events
Con Install is very painful
Con Search is very difficult
Here's an example:_sourceCategory=*windows* _sourceName=Security (4771 OR 4768 OR 4776 OR 4625) | parse regex "EventIdentifier = (?<event_id>\d+?);" | parse regex "ComputerName = \"(?<hostname>.+?)\"" | parse regex "(?:Result|Failure|Error) Code:.+?(?<result_code>0x[A-Fa-f\d]+)\b" nodrop | where result_code !="0x0" AND event_id in ("4771", "4768", "4776","4625") | count by hostname
Con Indexing and search are very slow
Sending around 45000 events to it may take more than 3 minutes to show up in the interface.
Once they show up, a search may take up to 32 seconds to return results. On only 45000 events, the search should return in milliseconds.
Con Difficult / Confusing Interface
The service and interface are very confusing.
Con There can be issues with smaller vendors
There may be some issues when using devices and services for smaller vendors which are not officially supported by Sumo Logic.
Con No free version
