Log Management

You Can Now Use observIQ Completely Free

Joe Howell
Joe Howell
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Today, we’re excited to announce a new completely free pricing tier for observIQ: the 3-day free plan.

With the observIQ free plan, you can ingest and index up to 3 gigabytes of logs per day with a 3 day rolling retention period. The free plan also provides unrestricted access to the observIQ feature set – including guided one-line agent installation, fleet, and agent lifecycle management, built-in dashboards, vast Source/integration library, live tail, and alerts — all attached to an optimized and hosted Elastic stack. No standing-up and managing your own logging backend – no wasting time digging around in docs or configuration files or docs.

The free plan gives anyone access to a simple yet powerful hosted log management – all completely free.

What observIQ Features Are Available in the Free Plan?

All the features, quite simply – there are no restrictions; no functionality is hidden behind a paywall. Here’s a quick rundown:

  • Blazing-fast log agent powered by Stanza – outperforming other popular OSS agents like Fluentd, Fluent Bit, and Logstash
  • Single-line agent installation commands for Linux, Mac, Windows, Kubernetes
  • Over 40 pre-built Sources/integrations for popular technologies
  • Fleet management: install and manage your Agents and Sources from the UI
  • Automated log parsing and enrichment
  • Built-in Dashboards
  • Alerts – notifications for E-mail, Pagerduty, and Slack
  • Live Tail – giving the ability to debug, live
  • In-app chat with our support team to answer questions and listen to feedback

Who can take advantage of the observIQ free plan?

Professionals: DevOps, ITOps, SRE, DevSecOps

If you’re a professional managing a fleet of containerized applications, databases, or Windows machines, the free plan gives you the needed headroom and history to investigate and analyze incidents from a wide array of technologies and cloud-native applications. With simple yet powerful platform support for Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Windows, and more – you can deploy a scalable logging solution in minutes and create threshold-based alerts to notify on critical incidents in your environment.

Additionally, installation commands are also automation-friendly and are compatible with popular frameworks like Ansible and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).

Enthusiasts: Homelabbers, Gamers, Personal Users

If you’re building out a homelab or just looking to monitor your gaming desktop, mining rig, or Plex server, the observIQ the Free plan is a perfect fit for you as well. observIQ offers broad support for generic log sources like File, Journald, JSON, CSV, and Syslog – giving you the ability to monitor activity in any log you’re interested in. Home networking gear – appliances – firewalls like Ubiquiti Unifi, PFsense, can commonly output to Syslog, and can be easily ingested and parsed with observIQ’s Syslog integration with a few clicks. observIQ can be used to monitor and map common security incidents as well, such as logon activity in Windows.

How Do I Access The Free observIQ 3-day Plan?

To get started, sign-up for a free trial for an observIQ here:

https://app.observiq.com/sign_up/
At any time during your trial, navigate to the billing page and choose the 3-Day Retention plan. No credit card required. Hit ‘apply’, and you’re good to go.

observIQ Pricing Tiers

What Can I Do With The observIQ Free Plan?

Gather, Parse, and Ship your logs to observIQ in Less Than 5 Minutes

Setup is incredibly simple – for the majority of users, end-to-end setup can take as little as 5 minutes. To get started, follow the setup instructions in our docs. TLDR, there are 3 simple steps:

  1. Install an Agent
  2. Add a Source to your agent
  3. Explore your logs

Utilize Over 40 Built-in Sources

Out of the box, observIQ offers more than 40 different Sources to add your Agents. You can see a full list of supported Sources on our integrations page: https://observiq.com/integrations/

observIQ Integrations List

Just so you’re aware, a Source in observIQ is a pre-made parsing pipeline for the targeted technology. The pipeline contains parsing rules and provides the observIQ agent instructions as to which files are to be read. The raw pipeline is hidden from the user; the user only verifies file path and simple configuration options as a part of Source configuration – the observIQ agent does the rest. Below are some of the most popular Sources you can utilize:

Generic Sources

File

JSON

Journald

Syslog

Ryslog

Syslog-ng

Windows Event Log

Amazon CloudWatch

Specialized Sources

Kubernetes

Apache HTTP server

NGiNX

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Microsoft IIS

Explore Your Logs With Powerful Search and Dynamic Filters

After you’ve shipped your logs to observIQ, you can use the Explore page to search and filter your logs to identify and investigate incidents in your environment. The dynamic filter bar allows you to easily search your logs by Severity, Agent, Source, or Type so you can cut through any noise and find the events you’re looking for.

Search and Dynamic Filter bar on the Explore page

Visualize Your Logs With Pre-made Dashboards

For many of the Sources in observIQ, a pre-made source-specific dashboard will automatically be deployed to your account as soon as the Source is created and added to your Agent. Dashboards provide insight into the health of your environment at a quick glance and the perfect starting point for incident investigation. Kubernetes, Windows, NGINX, Syslog are just a few examples of sources with pre-made dashboards. You can find a full list of dashboards here.

[oiq] NGINX – Overview Dashboard, automatically deployed

Manage the Lifecycle of Your Agents From Fleet

From the Fleet page, you can manage the lifecycle of your Agents and Sources – all from the comfort of the UI. You can install, update, modify, and delete without digging around in configuration files. You can also track Agent health and can keep tabs on per Agent log usage as well.

Create Threshold-based Alerts – Notify Your Existing Channels

With the freeplan, you can also create threshold-based alerts with your log data. Using Search and Filters, you can create an alert definition directly from the Explore page in observIQ, and avoid alert fatigue by using customizable frequency controls. You can also utilize Notifiers to notify Email, Slack, or Pagerduty when an alert triggers – allowing you to incorporate them into your existing workflow.

observIQ Alert definition firing a notification in Slack

Debug Live with Live Tail

With the freeplan, you’ll have full access to observIQ’s Live Tail functionality as well. Live Tail gives you the ability to stream and analyze your logs in real-time, without having to SSH or RDP into a specific system and running tail -f and grep.

If you’re running Kubernetes, Live Tail is a great replacement for tools like kubetail or kail, allowing you to easily tail your logs from a specific deployment, daemonset, or pod with dynamic filters.

Live tailing Kubernetes container logs

Why Choose the observIQ Free Plan?

ObservIQ provides simple yet powerful hosted log management, and the free plan makes it accessible to individual users, enthusiasts, and professionals alike – quite simply, you’ve got nothing to lose. With 3 gigabytes of ingestion and 3 days of retention, you have the flexibility you need to monitor the health of your environment, investigate incidents and alert on undesirable behavior.

If you’re interested in integrating a log management solution in your stack, you can save time and money by checking out the free plan, avoiding the potential headache of manually configuring log agents, and standing up and maintaining your own logging backend.

To sign-up for a free plan, sign-up for your account at https://app.observiq.com/sign_up/ and select the 3-day plan on the billing.

Signing-up for a free plan will yield you a free observIQ t-shirt as well! Happy logging!

Joe Howell
Joe Howell
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