Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Graylog2 vs Timber, the Slant community recommends Graylog2 for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Graylog2 is ranked 7th while Timber is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Graylog2 is:
Graylog2 is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Graylog2 is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Pro Easy setup
Graylog2 can be quickly installed on any Linux machine running Java 7 via an executable that allows installing and configuring remote dependencies and graylog2 itself via a web interface.
Pro Real-time
Information and statistics displayed update in real time.
Pro Great interface
Easy to overview, intuitive and full of explainers.
Pro Little maintenance
Pro Streams allow identifying events in real-time and perform actions
Stream allow filtering events in real time and perform action such as issue alerts or forward messages.
Pro Server-side functionality can be extended via plug-ins
Pro Works well with just about any type of logging
Pro Beautiful, modern, easy interface
The Timber interface stands out in the space:
- It's beautiful, easy, and modern.
- It's fast. It uses advanced front-end technologies to maximize performance and usability (react, redux, etc).
Pro Great search
Timber offers a really great simple search, with a support for advanced features like: term negation, condition grouping (parenthesis), regex, field searches and conditions, etc.
Pro SQL query your logs (w/ join support)
Timber allows you to SQL query your logs just like you would a traditional database. The JOIN support is very powerful.
Pro Six month searchable retention
The retention Timber offers is exceptionally longer. The default is generally 2 - 4 weeks, Timber offers 6 months.
Pro Real-time graphing
Because Timber fully embraces structured data, graphing is simple, real time, and fast. They provide a number of aggregates you can graph on.
Pro Automatic context & structured data
Timber provides native libraries that automatically attach metadata to your logs. They've designed a schema that defines events and context, which normalizes the data and makes querying, alerting, and graphing simple and reliable.
Pro Easy installation
Timber can be installed in < 1 min and usually with a single command. It asks your for your application details and provides 1 set of simple instructions.
Pro Simple pricing and plans. No feature matrices.
Besides the free plan, Timber doesn't impose limits on the number of users, alerts, etc. It's entirely based on the amount of data allowed for the plan. It's refreshingly straightforward.
Pro Real-time alerts with thresholds
The alerts are real-time and the approach is thoughtful. Instead of blasting you with alerts every time it's triggered, they change the state of the alert once, notify you once, and then notify you again when the alert is no longer an issue.
Pro Excellent documentation
Timber's docs are detailed and thoughtful, both for the service as well as the libraries they offer.
Pro No rate limiting
Beyond the space your plan is allowed to use, there is no rate limiting.
Pro Logs show up quickly
Logs show up < 3 seconds of when they are generated
Cons
Con Limited logging protocols support
Graylog2 only has support for syslog and GELF.
Con Self hosted. Difficult to maintain.
Maintenance is very difficult because of the high volume nature of logs.
Con Slow
Takes multiple servers even for smaller deployments
Con Interface is hard to use
The interface is hard to use, loaded with data, and difficult to understand.
Con Not really a centralized log management tool
It only takes in events from specified "apps", not all unstructured data. And, if you select "other" (apps), it just says:
Bummer! We don't support apps of this type yet.
Con Not available on self-hosted or bare metal
