When comparing ODE vs Timber, the Slant community recommends Timber for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Timber is ranked 17th while ODE is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Timber is:
The Timber interface stands out in the space: 1. It's beautiful, easy, and modern. 2. It's fast. It uses advanced front-end technologies to maximize performance and usability (react, redux, etc).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Scales easily
ODE instances are independent of each other, so they don't have to worry about a peer being added/removed. This allows the cluster to grow without any performance hit on the log aggregation. There is no redundancy built-in, but you can always use the forwarder to duplicate data. There is no sharding configuration or any other penalty that comes up with scaling a cluster. The clustering configuration is also very easy where you just list out peers for one of the node in order for it to run a search query on the whole cluster and merge the results. Scales better than any other open source log management tool out there.
Pro Add new parsers as you like
You can add any parser you want to ODE.
Pro Highly customizable
Pro Easy to use
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 Still in beta
Opallios ODE seems to be still in beta, as such there may be issues or missing features which are not yet implemented.
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.