When comparing Rocana vs Kafka, the Slant community recommends Kafka for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Kafka is ranked 8th while Rocana is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Kafka is:
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
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 Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
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 Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.
Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper