Comparison and Detailed Review of the Top Log Management Software with Features and Pricing. Select the Best Log Analysis Tool for Your Business:
Log management software is an application that examines the data generated by network devices to find security threats.
Routers, Switches, firewalls, IDS/IPS, Servers, Databases, and Web Servers produce a huge amount of log data. This data is analyzed by the log management tools to find out the security threats if any. Log management systems can consolidate and index any log and machine data.
It can be structured, unstructured, and even complex multi-line application logs.
Table of Contents:
Log Management Tools: Market Trending
The below image shows the Log Management Process.
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Log Analysis tools are used for various use cases like security, compliance & audit, IT operations, DevOps, and MSSP. Log management plays an important role in resource management, application troubleshooting, regulatory compliance & SIEM, business analytics, and marketing insights.
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Log management apps can be categorized into Log Analysis Tools, Log Monitoring Tools, and Log Management Tools. There are no limits on the storage of logs in the log management app. It depends on the plan availed by the customer. Similarly, the duration for which logs can be retained depends on the plan that you select.
Expert Advice: Most of the log management tools offer the same functions, but you should select the software that has visual dashboards, the one which is able to provide a lot of graphs and moreover beginner-friendly. You should also consider the type of data that you want to track & collect and the deployment options available with the software.
List of Top Log Management Software Tools
Given below is a list of the most popular Log Management Tools that are used worldwide.
- ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer
- Sematext Logs
- Site24x7
- Better Stack
- Splunk
- LogDNA
- Fluentd
- Logalyze
- Graylog
- Netwrix Auditor
- SolarWinds Log Analyzer
- Datadog HQ
Comparison of the Best Log Monitoring Tools
| Platform | Deployment | Free Trial | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer | Windows, Linux, Web | Windows, Linux, Web | 30 days | Quote-based |
Sematext Logs | Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker, Kubernetes. | On-premises and in the Cloud. | Available for 14 days | Basic: Free Standard: Starts at $50, Pro: Starts at $60, Enterprise: Get a quote. |
Site24x7 | Windows and Linux | Cloud | Available for 30 days | Starts at $9 per month. |
Better Stack | — | Cloud-hosted | Free plan availabl | Starts at $30/month |
Splunk | Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris. | On-Premises & SaaS. | Available | Free plan, Enterprise: $150 per ingested GB per month Cloud: Get a quote |
LogDNA | Windows, Mac, Linux. | Multi-cloud & on-premises. | Available for 14 days. | Free plan Birch: $1.50/GB/month Maple: $2/GB/month Oak: $3/GB/month |
Fluentd | Windows, Mac, & Linux. | — | — | Free |
Let’s Analyze!!
#1) ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer
Best for Managing Logs for Application Servers, Databases, Perimeter Devices, Workstations, Web Servers, etc.
Price: You’ll need to submit a request to get a free quote. A 30-day free trial of EventLog Analyzer is also available. Exclusive Year-End Discounts on ManageEngine products!
With EventLog Analyzer, you get a comprehensive Log Management tool that serves a number of key purposes. First and foremost, it allows you to securely archive collected logs. It does so by using advanced hashing and time stamping techniques. The software is also good for monitoring the integrity of your files, securing your web servers, and monitoring network devices.
Features:
- Get instant alert on critical changes made to important files and folders
- Instantly detect malicious IP traffic entering your traffic with the help of the global Threat Intelligence database
- Use Boolean search, group search, and range search to perform high-speed log searches.
- Correlate event log data in real-time.
Verdict: With integrated compliance management and a custom log parser to boast, EventLog Analyzer is a great log management software to protect your servers, applications, and databases from both external and internal threats.
#2) Sematext Logs
Best for any size of business.
Price: Sematext has three plans i.e. Free, Standard & Pro, in addition to its Enterprise offering. The Standard plan starts at $50/month, Pro at $60/month, while Enterprise depends on business needs.
A free 14-day trial is available. With the free plan, you will get a maximum of 500 MB of daily ingested volume.
Sematext Logs is a centralized log management solution available in the cloud or on-premises that allows you to collect, store, index, and perform real-time analysis of logs coming from a wide variety of data sources. It features a live log stream, alerting, and powerful searching & filtering capabilities for DevOps that want to troubleshoot faster.
Features:
- Real-time correlation of logs with metrics and other types of events.
- Exposes the Elasticsearch API making it easy to use with many popular log shipping tools, libraries, and systems compatible with Elasticsearch.
- Ability to handle large volumes of data.
- Integrated Kibana in addition to the native Sematext UI.
- Flexible app-scoped pricing based on the plan, volume, and retention selection, giving you lots of control over costs with no overage fees.
- Easy setup with their lightweight open-source, cloud-native data shipper, and log agent, for server, container, and application logs.
Verdict: Sematext ensures end-to-end visibility making it easier for DevOps to detect performance issues & troubleshoot before they impact users.
#3) Site24x7
Site24x7’s log management tool collects, consolidates, indexes, analyzes and manages logs from various servers, applications, and network devices.
It helps simplify troubleshooting by automatically identifying the logs in your server, categorizing them based on their type, and organizing them for easy indexing with an easy-to-use, query-based interface.
Key Features:
- Fix issues like external database call failures, application exceptions, file upload failures, and dynamic user input verification.
- Manage logs from different cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure using a single interface.
- Upload logs using log collectors like Logstash and Fluentd.
- Troubleshoot faster than ever with keyword-based searches and visual aids like graphs and dashboards to help you pinpoint the number of times a particular log has been indexed.
- Monitor log errors and receive threshold-based alerts via email, SMS, voice calls, and third-party collaboration tools that your organization uses.
Verdict: Site24x7 is a holistic log management solution with its cloud-native scalability, helping DevOps teams and infrastructure admins obtain complete visibility into their logging environment and troubleshoot quickly.
#4) Better Stack
Best for Small to large businesses.
Price: Better Stack offers 3 pricing plans. They are as follows:
- Freelancer: $30/month
- Small Team: $100/month
- Business: $200/month
A forever free plan is also available.
Better Stack is a platform that can aggregate all your logs in the form of structured data, which can be queried like a single database with SQL. It can fetch and contain logs from all your clusters, apps, servers, containers, and cloud providers in a single place. You’ll have absolutely no issue searching for them in real-time.
Features:
- Customize retention per source
- Pre-built dashboards that can be customized with drag and drop widgets
- Automatically parse logs
- Incident management
- Flexible anomaly detection
Verdict: With Better Stack, you get a log management tool that allows you to centralize, store, and search your logs at an exceptional speed. You gain full visibility over your entire stack and will be able to aggregate your logs into structured data.
Check our Better Stack Detailed Review
#5) Splunk
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Splunk offers three plans i.e. Splunk Free, Splunk Enterprise, and Splunk Cloud. Splunk Enterprise plan starts at $150 per ingested GB per month. You can get a quote for Splunk Cloud.
A free trial is available for Splunk Cloud as well as Splunk Enterprise. With the free Splunk plan, you will get a maximum of 500 MB of daily indexing volume.
Splunk provides a platform that can turn machine data into answers. Splunk log management has features of index machine data, search/correlate & investigate, drill-down analysis, monitor & alert, and reports & dashboard.
It will allow you to collect, search, store, index, correlate, visualize, and analyze any machine-generated data.
Features:
- With the premium plans, you will get full access to APIs and SDKs for the developer environment.
- It can collect and index any machine data.
- It has the capacity to store up to 90 days of data with a cloud-based solution.
- It has a real-time search, analysis, and visualization.
Verdict: Splunk provides a solution for IT Operations, App Analytics, IoT, Business Analytics, and Security. This solution is scalable with your data. It makes use of AI to give you actionable and predictive insights.
#6) LogDNA
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: For the Enterprise Grade solution, there can be cloud log management and an On-premise solution. You can get a quote for the enterprise-grade solution. For Cloud logging, LogDNA has four plans i.e. Free plan, Birch ($1.50 per GB per month), Maple ($2 per GB per month), and Oak ($3 per GB per month).
LogDNA provides a centralized solution for log management. It can provide deployment in the cloud, multi-cloud, and on-premises. This software will perform real-time aggregation, monitoring, and analysis of the logs. It has features of modern UI, fast search & filtering, and smart alerting.
Features:
- LogDNA can perform real-time log aggregation, monitoring, and analysis through any platform.
- It has features of real-time alerts, archiving, and automatic field parsing.
- It can work with any data volume.
- LogDNA is privacy shield certified.
- It has the capacity to handle 1M log events per second and more than 100 terabytes per customer per day.
Verdict: LogDNA provides infinite scalability. It provides powerful log management through a suite of tools such as log aggregation, custom parsing, role-based access controls, real-time-search, graphs, etc.
#7) Fluentd
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Free and open source.
Fluentd is an open-source solution that will work as a data collector of a unified logging layer. It will work by decoupling data sources from the backend systems by offering a unified logging layer in between.
Features:
- It will provide an OS default Memory allocator.
- It has features of self-service configuration, C & Ruby language, and 40 MB memory.
- It will utilize a little system resource as written in a combination of C and Ruby language.
- Fluentd has more than 500 plugins that can connect with many data sources and outputs.
- It has community-driven support.
Verdict: Fluentd can collect and perform analysis on an app log and a middleware log. It will help you to improve your daily operations and services. It can also tally action logs and monitor them for puzzle games.
#8) Logalyze
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Free and open source.
Like Fluentd, Logalyze is also an open-source log management software. It can be used as centralized log management & network monitoring system, application log analyzer, and network management tool.
Event logs from the distributed Windows hosts and Syslogs from distributed Linux or UNIX or AIX hosts are collected. It can collect network elements such as switches & routers, firewalls, etc.
Features:
- Log analyzer engine has features of collectors, Parser & analyzer modules, statistics & aggregation, events & alerts, and Logalyze SOAP API.
- The administrator interface has general features of access through a customizable web-based HTML and multi-language user interface, log browser, statistics viewer, report generator, and admin functions.
- It has the ability to parse custom business application logs.
Verdict: Logalyze performs the classification of collected logs by various factors like source host, severity, etc. It provides multi-dimensional statistics and correlated event detection in real time by analyzing the log data. You will get pre-defined compliance reports.
#9) Graylog
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Three types of licenses are available with Graylog i.e. open-source with unlimited data, a free enterprise with enterprise features & limited to 5GB per day, and commercial with full enterprise features. Pricing for the commercial license will be based on the daily ingest volume.
Graylog offers a centralized log management solution that can capture, store, and perform real-time analysis of terabytes of machine data. Terabytes of data can be brought in from multiple log sources, data centers, and geographies. It is horizontally scalable in your data center, cloud, or in both.
Features:
- It provides a faster alert on cyber threats.
- It will quickly analyze the data and will provide effective incident response.
- It has a simple and intuitive UI that will help you to explore, alert, and report on data.
- It has features of data collection, organization, analyzing, extracting, and security & performance.
- Security & performance optimization: It has features for audit logs, archiving, role-based access control, and fault tolerance.
Verdict: The correlation engine will allow you to build complex alerts according to the relationship between multiple events. It will allow you to schedule the reports. It provides enhanced search, views, and dashboards.
#10) Netwrix Auditor
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: You can get a quote for Data Discovery & Classification and Auditing & Compliance reporting. It offers a free trial for 20 days.
Netwrix Auditor can detect security threats. It is an IT audit software. It supports the Windows Operating system. Netwrix Auditor can be used for various IT systems such as active directory, windows server, network devices, etc. It will help you to perform remote access monitoring.
Features:
- For network devices, you will get complete visibility on configuration changes, logon attempts, scanning threats, and hardware malfunctions.
- Hardware malfunctions will be detected on Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto, SonicWall, and Juniper devices.
- Netwrix auditor is also available for SharePoint, Office365, Oracle Database, SQL Server, Windows Server, VMware, and Windows File Servers.
- It will give alerts on critical events such as a change in the device configuration, etc.
Verdict: Netwrix Auditor will detect threats within your perimeter by continuously monitoring network devices. It will help you to improve security in your organization. It will report hardware malfunction.
#11) SolarWinds Log Analyzer
Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Solarwinds Log Analyzer price starts at $1495. It offers a fully functional free trial for 30 days.
SolarWinds Log Analyzer performs log aggregation, tagging, filtering, and alerting and will provide you with effective troubleshooting. It has features of event log tagging, powerful search & filter, real-time log stream, Orion platform integration, Orion Alert integration, and Log & event collection & analysis.
Features:
- It will help you to do root cause analysis with the help of the log monitoring tools.
- The tool will allow you to execute searches using multiple search criteria and apply filters.
- It will provide an interactive and real-time log stream.
- Color-coded tags to log data.
Verdict: Thousands of Syslog, traps, Windows, and VMware events can be collected, consolidated, and analyzed. You will get a rapid identification of performance and availability issues.
#12) Datadog HQ
Datadog is an essential monitoring service for hybrid cloud environments. By collecting metrics, events, and logs from more than 450 technologies, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility across the dynamic, high-scale infrastructure.
Datadog log management accelerates troubleshooting efforts with rich, correlated data from across your environment, with dynamic indexing policies that make it cost-effective to collect, inspect, and store all your logs.
Key Features:
- Use Datadog to quickly search, filter, and analyze your logs for troubleshooting and open-ended exploration of your data.
- Visualize and explore collected logs using intuitive, facet-driven navigation–no query language required.
- See log data in context with auto-tagging and metric correlation.
- Discover log patterns and errors rapidly with machine learning-based monitors and detection.
- Create real-time log analytics dashboards in seconds with Datadog’s drag-and-drop capabilities.
- Send, process, and keep track of every log produced by your applications and infrastructure but only pay to index the high-value logs you need with Logging Without Limits.
- Easily collect logs with over 450+ vendor-supported integrations including Logstash, Fluentd, Elasticsearch, AWS Cloudwatch, NGINX, and more.
Conclusion
Splunk log management is the solution for Business Analytics, IoT, Security, IT Operations, etc. ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer is an end-to-end log management software with features of Application audit, IT compliance, Network audit, etc.
SolarWinds Log Analyzer has functionalities for log aggregation, tagging, filtering, and alerting. LogDNA is a centralized log management solution that performs real-time aggregation, monitoring, and analysis of the logs. Fluentd and Logalyze is a free and open-source log management system.
Graylog will provide a centralized log management solution that can work with terabytes of machine data. Netwrix Auditor is an IT audit software that supports Windows OS.
Hope this article helped you learn about the Top Log Management Tools along with their reviews.
Review Process: Our writers have spent more than 12 hours researching this topic. Initially, we shortlisted 12 tools but based on the features, reviews, and popularity of the tools we picked up the top 8 log management tools. This will help you choose the right solution for your business.