5 Key Considerations When Choosing a Log Management Solution

Cost

Purchase decisions often begin with a price check. Log management is no different. You can evaluate your budget and narrow down the options that fit you to choose the tool that gives you the most for what you pay. As always, cheaper is better if the platform doesn’t cut corners. However, 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 what features are critical to your needs, your technical limitations, and how much you can afford to spend.

• Access to critical 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 keep, the more your prices increase.
• 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 ingested into your account based on your plan/ subscription model. If your daily log ingestion volume is high, you should invest in a plan priced higher and with a higher data limit.

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Simple Onboarding and Superior User Experience

As far as cloud apps go, usability is everything! Any application that could be more 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 essential 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

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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 inquiry to your log management system 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, you must approach log management with a company that has all the necessary compliance formats, regulations, and excellent security. 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
• FIRMA
• PCI
• GDPR
• FEDRAMP

The observIQ Advantage

If you read this post, the log management solution that observIQ provides will interest you. observIQ covers all the requisites detailed above and more. You can explore our services; if you have any questions, please contact our friendly customer support team; they are around to help you with all your requests/questions.