Observability

5 Key Considerations When Choosing a Log Management Solution

Deepa Ramachandra
Deepa Ramachandra
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Cost

Purchase decisions often begin with a price check. Log management is no different. Evaluate your budget and narrow down the options that fit to choose the tool that gives you the most for what you pay. As always, cheaper is better as long as the platform doesn’t cut any corners. But with log management, there is a catch – not all tools are transparent with their pricing model. There are often hidden fees, exponential increases in price with usage, or essential features that get locked behind ‘premium’ walls. It helps to know ahead of time what features are essential to your needs, what kind of technical limitations you face, and how much you can afford to spend.

  • Access to key features like extended retention, live tail, alerts, and automated parsing comes at a price. If you don’t perfectly understand your needs, look for an application that provides all these within your price range.
  • You are charged based on how much log data you ingest and how long you retain them. The more you retain and the longer you retain, the more your prices go up.
  • The number of users accessing your log management system matters. Some tools have a pay-per-user model and others have an organization-based user limit.
  • If you need to manage logs for multiple organizations, consider the versatility vs pricing of different solutions. Pricing often varies based on how many companies or individual sources you want to manage within a single account.
  • There is a data limit on the logs that are ingested into your account based on your plan/ subscription model. If your daily log ingestion volume is high, you may want to invest on a plan that is priced higher, with a higher data limit.

Simple onboarding and superior user experience

As far as cloud apps go, usability is everything! Any application that is not intuitive should not be on your radar for log management since you might as well use open source tools over a convoluted paid option. Here are the UI elements that make a system intuitive:

  1. Simple navigation options
  2. Uncluttered user interface that presents critical information up front and enhances the user experience
  3. Options to perform important actions such as save, search, and filter your logs
  4. Visually appealing, useful dashboards
  5. Context sensitive help and support options for in-product support

Helpful customer support

All good cloud application platforms offer helpful support, but what makes the difference is going the extra mile to help you get started using their system, setting everything up just as you envisioned. Send a pre-sales enquiry to your log management system of choice and see how they respond. Test the waters before you make a financial and data commitment to any platform. Always remember, although systems are getting more intuitive by the day, there are times when you may need to speak with the people behind the system with a request, and that experience is a make or break factor.

Reliability

Your log data could contain confidential information about your network, users, and company information. To protect your knowledge assets, it is critical that you approach log management with a company that has all the necessary compliance formats, regulations, and excellent security in place. If not, when there are audits or compliance concerns, you may have to go through additional hoops to attain the certification. A good log management platform will come with features meeting the following compliance standards:

  • HIPAA
  • FISMA
  • PCI
  • GDPR
  • FEDRAMP

The observIQ advantage

If you are reading this post, the log management solution that observIQ provides will be of interest to you. observIQ covers all the requisites detailed above and more. Explore our services, if you have any questions, reach out to our friendly customer support team, they are around to assist you with all your requests/questions.

Deepa Ramachandra
Deepa Ramachandra
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