When comparing Fluentd vs Appenlight, the Slant community recommends Fluentd for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Fluentd is ranked 4th while Appenlight is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Fluentd is:
Gives structure to unstructured logs.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Logs everything in JSON
Gives structure to unstructured logs.
Pro Logs stored to FS buffer while network is down
Logs aren't lost due to network issues.
Pro In-stream processing
With a list of 150+ plugins, Fluentd can perform all kinds of in-stream data processing tasks.
Pro Huge plugin ecosystem
Fluentd has a plugin ecosystem that has resulted in developers creating over 150 plugins for the service.
Pro Prioritizes simplicity and robustness
For example, inputs and outputs have built-in support for buffering, load-balancing, timeouts and retries so to be able to deliver data reliably.
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under Apache 2.0.
Pro Routing based on tags
Pro Exponential retry wait
Pro Copy to multiple storages
Pro Based on CRuby
Pro Log events system
It's possible to trigger events on certain logs. For example log.error happens, or failed password text is found in logs
Pro Error reporting
Sentry compatible and custom error reporting for most popular languages like JavaScript, Go, Python, Java, and PHP.
Pro Scales for Enterprises
Multi-node elasticsearch and scalable architecture easily supports 10000s+ of events/min
Pro Custom log Dashboards
Plot any type of graphs and aggregation with an easy to use composer.
Cons
Con Difficult to setup
Requires a significant time investment to get up and running.