When comparing Rocana vs Logstash, 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 Rocana is ranked 15th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 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
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 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.