Choosing the Best Log Management Tool for Your System

Log management and SIEM are not discussed by non-technical persons and are known not more. If we go further many things can generate log files such as firewalls, routers, operating systems, etc. but the question is, how do you identify the presence of log messages, records or any kind of trails? As there are hundreds and thousands of generated log files and it is necessary to detect them. So for the sake of your security, you should keep log monitoring tools up to date.

There are various log management tools available in the market and you can choose them as per your convenience because every tool is designed for a purpose and each one differs from other.

So in this blog, we will discuss several log management tools which are running successfully in the geeky market and sturdy as hell. But before comparing them let us understand log management a little.

Log management handles large volumes of computer-generated log messages. These messages are also famous for audit records, audit trails, event-logs, etc. What they do is:

• Log collection
• Centralized log aggregation
• Long-term log storage and retention
• Log rotation
• Real-time and in bulk after storage log analysis
• Log search and reporting

As a simple practice, you should gather all the data at one place. Check it and you will get the information, and that is what you want correctly. Because what would you do with the data? There will be an enormous amount of it and it’s useless if you don’t know what it is.

Now, to manage them is necessary and for that you will need various log tools. See how complicated it is? So let’s check it out which tools can support your complications in managing the log files.

1. Motadata

Motadata processes any type of data on any of the given formats as well as coming from any of the sources. It comes with HIDS, SIEM, integrity of files and intrusion detection.

Motadata software platform is highly scalable and flexible with centralized aggregation. It protects your confidential data and avoids unauthorized entry or access to your files and folders. It detects security breaches very swiftly.

Motadata data model driven log monitoring platform comes with

• Centralized Log Management
• Log Correlation
• Agentless or Agent-based collection
• Compliance Reporting
• Aggregates multiple heterogeneous resources
• Normalize Log Data
• Full text search with raw messages
• Any Device/Server/App/Text

With Motadata, we provide the ideal solution required to perfectly manage the problems of today’s increasingly multifaceted business operations and IT infrastructure administration. And the best thing is that we at Motadata are currently offering you a 30 day free trial offer of our Log management software platform, so explore Motadata right now.

2. Splunk.

Splunk enterprise provides you operational intelligence from your machine-generated data. It comes with a range of search, visualization, and pre-packaged content for use-cases that any user can explore to discover and share insights. Splunk also has built-in reporting capabilities with advanced charts and dashboards and a pivot interface to generate visual reports with drag-and-drop ease.

It serves you when you especially require

• Real-time search, analysis and visualization
• Comfortable built in alerting and reporting
• Easy manual configurations for charts and dashboards

Also splunk has some of the major cons

It is more subjective being an on-premise solution which leads to a setup cost. It is complex to deal with and need deployment in a high-scale environment. You will require installing and configuring with a dedicated cluster.

So for taking advantages of this platform you need to set up all the sources manually that is a little complex, costly and time consuming.

3. LogPacker

LogPacker is especially made in two versions for different uses: Standalone and Cloud. Standalone version shows collaborations of agents and servers. It runs on Unix, Windows, Android and iOS. While server stores logs from all agents and saves them at one storage location. It provides a full web interface with dashboards and search functions.

Splunk and LogPacker both perform almost at the same stage but they conquer each other in various fields. You are supposed to set up all the resources in Splunk while LogPacker has built in support for more than 100 sources for logs. Splunk is far easy and better than LogPacker when it comes to visual interface. Splunk has the easiest interface to handle while LogPacker does not hold specific interface.

So LogPacker helps you a lot in:

• In finding sources of the logs because it supports up to 100 sources which are available
• It gives you multiple storage options
• It provides and enables alerts via your email or SMS

However with some of the cons:

• Standalone version do not have any built-in web interface
• The free version has limitations and caters only up to 5 servers in the cluster

4. Loggly

Loggly is another cloud-based log management service which penetrates the roots of log data in real-time while giving you the most crucial information, on how to improve your code and deliver a better customer experience. It has a flagship log data collection means that you can use traditional standards like HTTP and Syslog. It is actually very light weight and totally free if you are willing to test it, It will surely please you as it can dive too deep in the ocean of data that even big and reputed tools cannot do it sometimes. It also comes in three more variants standard, pro and enterprise.

It doesn’t make that much difference between three discussed log management tools. A little change can acquire you efficiency and depends on the matter of choice. It also gives you facilities in cloud version, but if you use LogPacker for this requirement then it will give you better results than Loggly.

Cons

• Not transparent in configuration or in sources configuration
• Not flexible in cloud infrastructures
• Not fully secure

5. LOGENTRIES

As we said previously the procedure to collect all the log files at one place, Logentries is the perfect example for it. Just as a simple task it automatically collects and centralizes all the log data in any format at one location where you can search, aggregate, and visualize log data to get answers to your questions, in seconds. Simple, isn’t it? We found this log management tools the best, simple and secure.

The pros include aggregated live tail search, Custom tags of logs, Email reports, supports a diverse set of programming languages and offers decent documentation.

Cons

• The same manual installation and manual log sources management
• There’s a limit of 100 logs per server
• Can’t track the source of errors in 3rd party libraries
• Insufficiently secure web client logger
• No specialized reporting for JavaScript

Key Takeaways

So that was it readers. There are numerous log management tools available in the market right now and even those tools might give a tough competition. These are the good performers at overall scales. We have shown them best as per the requirements of the consumer. So we hope that it will make your complexions easy.