Logstash vs. SolarWinds Log Analyzer (LA)

Logstash is a must in an ELK stack, which I am sure is going to be the #1 case. At any point when you have several sources, Logstash can be the common point to aggregate, and categorize those data. Then send this new data to its destination. Very handy. It is free and open source. It may not be appropriate to analyze data-sets dependent on each other but from a different data source. Reason being Logstash works on data at hand, and not wait for other data to arrive. It would be unwise for Logstashh to handle complicated, long-running transformations because this is injected and ejected. The faster you do it, the safer.

Incentivized

Some of equipment does not support correct monitoring of particular errors via standard SNMP requests (example - Juniper SRX licenses expiration). In this case getting and analyzing syslogs as well as creating event-based alerts/notifications brings great relief of a network administrator life! The second case - is a simple analyzing firewall log events as SolarWinds Log Analyzer (LA) can keep logs for a longer time than an equipment built-in tool.

Incentivized

• Plugin ecosystem allows modular extensions.
• Tight integration into the Elastic.com products of Beats and Elasticsearch, so minimal setup is required when using those tools.
• Filter plugins are powerful for extracting and enriching input data.

Incentivized

• Event based custom alarms
• Useful search filters
• Real-time streaming

Incentivized

• Memory: Logstash is a HOG, if you are deploying it on commodity (i.e. cheap and old) hardware: You will need at least 2GB, just for Logstash. So don't expect to run your entire ELK stack on one AMD Athlon machine.
• Overlap: Logstash fills in an area of the ELK stack that makes the most sense: as a log file transformer / shipper. However, if you start breaking that stack, with the addition of other components- you start seeing where features of Logstash may be implemented or solved in the additional components much easier (or better, or to a higher degree of resolution)
• More Overlap: Since my team employs Syslog-ng extensively- Logstash can sometimes get in the way (and this may be a problem for DevOps stacks overall): You can configure Syslog to record certain information from a source, filter that data, and even export that data in a particular format. Logstash will pick that data up, and then parse it. However, if you don't keep your Syslog-ng configuration files, and your Logstash configuration files in sync, your results will not be what you expected, and this will translate into (sometimes) hours/days of work, hunting down a line item in a configuration file.

Incentivized

• Network management
• Server infrastructure management

Incentivized

As I said earlier, for a production-grade OpenStack Telco cloud, Logstash brings high value in flexibility, compliance, and troubleshooting efficiency. However, this brings a higher infra & ops cost on resources, but that is not a problem in big datacenters because there is no resource crunch in terms of servers or CPU/RAM

MongoDB and Azure SQL Database are just that: Databases, and they allow you to pipe data into a database, which means that alot of the log filtering becomes a simple exercise of querying information from a DBMS. However, LogStash was chosen for it's ease of integration into our choice of using ELK Elasticsearch is an obvious inclusion: Using Logstash with it's native DevOps stack its really rational

Incentivized

Based on my personal experience SolorWinds Log Analyzer is the best product on the market. Splunk Enterprise is the other system we use for monitoring but it's more complicated and requires extra skills Moreover Solarwinds Support Team response fast to any issues

Incentivized

• It is very difficult to give any figures on ROI, as it depends on many factors, and in a Telcocloud environment, it is much complex to find out; however, I would give some points below on ROI
• ROI based on flexibility is very high, as it reduces the time to find RCA
• ROI based on integration is very high because it supports multi-vendor environments, avoiding vendor lock-in & works across multi-cloud setups
• ROI on resource consumption is less because Logstash in 2-3 times more resource-intensive as compared to its lightweight alternatives resulting in latency

• Decrease issue reaction time
• Simplify an issue root cause reporting

Incentivized