LogDNA Software

We are a SaaS company and we run multiple environments, some of which are multi-tenant. The ramp up experience has been pleasant and easy, and I love having very direct access to various parts of their team. Using LogDNA has moved us from disparate logs spread across multiple servers into a common logging platform that ... just... works.

Pros

The ease of setup, especially on kubernetes, is outstanding. The web application features are rich and provide us almost all of the tools we need. They are constantly introducing new ways of analyzing our logs and I look forward to what the team produces in the future.

Cons

I got some feedback from my team that their .NET client was not ideal. It's functional, but needed some customization to really sing. I have provided this feedback and their Head of Product reached out to give me some visibility into their roadmap. This level of responsiveness and awareness is refreshing, and turns this ultimately minor con into a pro.

Pros

Best features I always use are saving the frequent searches, drilling down to pod level logs ( in k8s ), being able to tag and search against a time frame.

Cons

There has not been much of cons for our use case but once I did feel there has been an issue with log ingestion where we missed some logs. It just happened once.

We're trying to ensure that we can watch logs across multiple clusters and multiple machines. This allows any of our developers to watch for errors from a single interface, rather than having so SSH into each machine.

We're also not at the scale to run a system like this ourselves, so it's easier to use an existing product, like LogDNA.

Pros

I love the simplicity of LogDNA. It works well for our small environment and seems to have the ability to scale up.

The pricing structure makes sense and suits our needs.

It's also super easy to install and set up on our servers. I've managed to add it to the provisioning system that we use.

Cons

Nothing, at the moment it suits our needs perfectly.

Pros

Easy to set up. Both the Python and Kubernetes drivers are simple, lean, and efficient. The web UI is beautiful and fast. Much more useful out of the box than a standard ELK stack. Can get a lot of benefit even in the inexpensive usage plan.

Cons

Feature development seems to prioritize mainly around enterprise customers, so small quality-of-life updates are taking a while.

It was great. The team is easy to work with and they have a great product.

Pros

Extremely easy to use and does everything you need from a product like this

Cons

Honestly there was not much. For our use case, we really didn't have anything that we needed it to do.

Pros

After struggling for years with tail-ing the logfiles of our servers, some genius told me that I should have a look at LogDNA. With their low pricing, I could hardly imagine that they offered quality software. But they do! Once setup at the server, it's easy to create filters (based on server, process, tag or level) to create custom views. So, for example, you can set a view to show all log entries from an error level for a certain process. On top of that, you can also create alarms for views to receive notifications at a certain treshold.

Cons

For 99% it does what I expect it to do. The only downside over the past years was that occasionally it was a bit slowish with realtime live updates. But most of the time it's pretty fast.

very good. already moved lots of our product to LogDNA

Pros

- i like the S3 archiving
- the search is fast

Cons

- sometimes, the search part is not powerful enough.
- it will be great if can have a local parser for reading archived data.\

Pros

I like the fact that is super easy to use, easy to apply filters and configure. Better yet, I like the fact that the development team will listen to us customers in regards new features or specific troubles.

Cons

The box for entering the filter queries could be slightly bigger. Some of my filters are extremely big because I have a need to see specialized errors and throw alerts when they happen. Often I have to copy the filters to a text editor so I can paste them back.

Pros

User interface is top notch. So much better than most competitors I've evaluated (which is quite a few actually).

Saved views, quick searches and view context functions makes this a joy to use.

Cons

Two things are blocking our expanded usage of LogDNA for our much bigger product & team:

1. Reliability. The repeated issues with the remote syslog log ingestion is just not acceptable. I've contacted support about it before, but I won't bother again until it seriously improves. We have to restart at least one logspout container each 1-2 weeks. And there ARE NO ALERTS that things aren't ingesting properly.

Basically I don't trust that all log data is there anymore.

2. Pricing. The pricing is great for small log volumes and short durations (as for the product we've migrated to LogDNA). But for slightly larger volumes (say 50 GB) or longer storage (14-30 days), the pricing is too high compared to competitive offerings (from e.g. Logentries).

Fewer plans (3 + free) with clear separation by features would be clearer. Costs should increase linearly with storage volume AND retention length (multiplied). This would make pricing clear and logical, instead of using "minimum charges" which is just annoying and stops us from increasing our usage until we reach that threshold.

I completely understand the need to raise prices for more value delivered, but it should be structured so that customers clearly perceive the added value. For instance, you should probably add advanced alerts to an "Enterprise" plan, and possibly limit graph usage for "Starter" plans, etc.

I didn't have any searchable log solution before, so it was the main benefit it provided us.
The nice ui is good too

Pros

Friendly UI and easiness of use.
It's pretty fast and easy to filter the log content that interests me.

Cons

The way to find log in context.
For example: I usually have a request id to search for in the logs, but when I find it I have to do multiple steps to find it in context (x lines before and x lines after)

Detailed insight to specific log items.

Pros

I like that you can filter quickly and get to the specific pod, time, filter, app. I also like the statistics and is integrated well w/ python logger library w/ the filters. I like that I can access the logs from anywhere.

Cons

Limit of 30days history for our account. Timestamps need to be converted and not as user friendly. I would like to more visibility on all it's capabilities like ContextFilter was interesting and discovered recently.

We were able to get up and running logging centrally from Kubernetes, and it got us through at least one software MVP.

Kudos to the team, there just were too many rough spots to move our entire logging infrastructure over to LogDNA.

Pros

- The Kubernetes integration was fantastic, it was easy to get set up
- The pricing was very reasonable

Cons

- We wanted a single account for our team to make billing easier, but we had no way to segregate "Views" on the left sidebar. We needed some way to have per-cluster views/searches, otherwise it would be very difficult to navigate.
- We found we could not trust the "Live" view after clicking around in the UI for a little bit, or leaving it running for a while. We couldn't pinpoint what made it stop updating correctly, but we often had to do a full refresh of the page to see the latest logs, after which we would be inundated with logs that we had missed and it was hard to find our place again.

Debugging.

Pros

Filtering query logic is a lifesaver when parsing through massive amount of logs. Real time logs are also a must have feature.

Cons

Data retention costs are quite expensive. They could improve with better graphing abilities, currently difficult to set up.

"One Ring to rule them all" - helps with monitoring cloud environment with many nodes - alerts helps fix a problems.

Pros

Simple interface, great user experience.
Feature-rich: it fits all my needs regarding log monitoring.
Multiple integrations support many OS, using dedicated agent makes integration easy.
Dynamic development brings new features.
Reasonable price.

Cons

Sometimes there are lags in log processing also I've spotted some missing logs (migrate from syslog to agent integration doesn't fix a problem).

Linux agent consume to much memory - it's an issue on cloud VMs with small amount of memory, where overhead on monitoring/logs should be as small as possible.

Graphs looks pretty - but should have more interaction with logs filter - eg. filter could map on graph - changing filter conditions change graph conditions as well.

Pros

It keeps me well informed of what is really happening in my software products. I can very easily search and get notified of any problems that are important to me. LogDNA is very simple to integrate and use with a great pricing options.

Cons

Sometimes, it is hard to navigate with lots of defined views without the option to group them if I don't remember their titles.

Pros

Not only is LogDNA incredibly simple to setup and use, but it doesn't overwhelm you with features. It does one thing really well: logging. Also, LogDNA is very affordable compared to the alternatives (most of which have lots of features I don't want). LogDNA is a simple product, but it fills a niche that no one else does as simply or elegantly.

Cons

Nothing! LogDNA is exactly what I want it to be. The only thing that's slightly annoying is that their search doesn't do partial string matching very well, but it's really not that hard to type out the whole search string :)

Pros

We use LogDNA almost like a remote terminal. When we deploy to our development servers, we run QA tests and check LogDNA to see if the tests worked or not.

Cons

It was a little difficult for us to set it up on elasticbeanstalk initially. We've also had instances where LogDNA didn't update, but that was resolved by support.

Pros

We've used a few other logging tools before, and still struggled with debugging our webapp on multiple servers. Then we found LogDNA, and decided to give it a try. Wow! It's so simple to install, we were up and running within a few minutes. The user interface is clean and intuitive. It's really easy to search keywords (even excluding terms), and jump to timeframes in your own local timezone. You can even type in 10 hours ago and it just works by jumping to the log line with a highlighted marker. It's saved us so much time when diagnosing a problem, tuning our app/server performance, and even when reviewing the logs to predict trends.

I also love the alerts and integration with email, Slack, PagerDuty, and even your own Webhook. With a couple of clicks, you can set up the notification rules to trigger an alert. With LogDNA, we always know what's going on at every level throughout the stack.

Cons

You can't customize the colors for log levels. Although they have a few preset themes to choose from, you can't fully customize it. For example, it's easy to see the Error level highlighted in red, but for the remaining log levels such as Info, Notice, Warning, Fatal, etc., the colors are the same so you can't quickly skim the logs without reading it.

Pros

LogDNA makes searching for context when hunting down a bug trivially easy. The way we select which log files to comb through is very intuitive, and the speed that it returns out search results is very fast.

We use LogDNA to send meaningful logs from our many microservices. It gave us the ability to look through historical error events and check the status of the workers. For critical services, we are able to receive notifications when errors occur. It's really superb.

Pros

It's very fast, always working and the feature-set makes it so great to find bugs and see status. The meta search and time filters are superb.

Cons

We have many microservices and it's hard to manage more than a few saved views. The ability to organise and create collections of saved views would really be the final polish for our use-case.