When comparing Rocana 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 Rocana is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Timber is:
The retention Timber offers is exceptionally longer. The default is generally 2 - 4 weeks, Timber offers 6 months.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great "out-of-the-box" analytics
Beyond simple rules-based alerting, Rocana Ops creates statistical models for each of the metrics you want to track and evaluates as data streams in to provide nearly instantaneous feedback on how your systems are performing. Unique WARN (Weighted Analytic Risk Notifications) Scores indicate components that are trending to the good or bad. Users can create custom metrics, which get evaluated just the same as "out-of-the-box" metrics.
Pro Highly scalable
Collect and analyze multiple TBs of data per day, built on Hadoop components Rocana Ops is a highly-distributed system offering massive scalability using commodity hardware. Rocana has customers collecting 10+ TBs of log data per day.
Rocana One free option provides up to 1TB of daily data volume for free.
Pro Six month searchable retention
The retention Timber offers is exceptionally longer. The default is generally 2 - 4 weeks, Timber offers 6 months.
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 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 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
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.
Cons
Con Expensive
Appears to be an expensive solution.
Con Doesn't run on a laptop
Well, maybe you can squeeze Rocana Ops on a laptop, but it is designed as a highly-distributed, fault-tolerant system and requires a Hadoop distro as the underlying platform.
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.
