Free Cloud-based Log and Metrics Management Solutions

by Max Rohde,

I have been looking around for a while for a cloud-based service which allows collecting logs and metrics and analysing them. I am particularly interested in a solution which can be deployed for free for smaller applications/amounts of data.

Here are some of the solutions I came across:

Loggly

loggly

  • Store and analyse logs and metrics
  • Free plan available: For 200MB/day, 7 day data retention
  • It looks to me like the Free plan does not allow using the Loggly API!

Splunk

splunk

  • One of the first and most popular solutions in the space
  • Store and analyse logs and metrics
  • Free version available; allows storing up to 500MB/day; I don't think there is any limitation on data retention
  • Note that free version requires to install the Splunk server on your own server

Sematext

sematext

  • Based on popular open source ELK stack
  • Free plan allows monitoring up to 5 hosts, but only comes with 30 min data retention

Logz.io

logz

  • Also based on ELK stack
  • Free plan allows 3GB upload per day; data retention limited to 3 days.

Overall, I am not too happy with these offerings. In particular, the short data retention periods seem to make some of these offerings too limited to be useful.

Maybe the best option here would be to install your own ELK stack or Graylog. Here are some guides for that:

Categories: devops