As long as we have had computers, or maybe even before, there has been log data keeping tabs on all the comings and goings inside the system. These logs can be messy and hard to read. Programs have now come along that can interpret this data and display it in easy to understand charts and graphs. The software can sometimes even read the data and give recommendations to developers and Ops people to help them solve problems more quickly.
Indeed, one of these programs, Loggly, was named to our Top 50 Cloud Monitoring Software Tools list for 2017. It's a SaaS-based, unified log monitoring and log analytics product, that aggregates, structures, and summarizes log data so users can analyze and visualize their data to answer key questions, spot trends, and deliver actionable reports, the company claims. The company currently has over 10,000 customers, including a third of the Fortune 500.
Loggly recently announced that it has been acquired by SolarWinds. Collectively, the SolarWinds Cloud portfolio gives customers broad visibility into traces, logs, metrics, and the digital experience.
SolarWinds: The Bigger Picture
SolarWinds Cloud currently offers:
- AppOptics - Application and infrastructure monitoring
- Pingdom - Web performance management
- Papertrail - Cloud-hosted log management
“Building on these strengths, we will continue investing in Loggly to innovate and extend its value to customers, while integrating its capabilities with our other Cloud offerings to address even broader needs,” stated Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds, in a prepared statement.
It appears as though SolarWinds will keep both Papertrail and Loggly as active products in their portfolio, even though both products are quite similar, and have been direct competitors for awhile. The press release was not clear as to whether Papertrail would continue to be offered. However, there are some customers who use both.
SolarWinds Papertrail vs. Loggly?
One customer commented that from their perspective, Loggly had a huge limitation in alerting. The customer needs to share saved searches within the company and run more than 5 different searches. The customer also mentioned that Papertrail had different limitations being that it did not have inputs and HTTP API, which leads to situations where you can not segregate your data (imagine two parallel scripts which generate the same type of debug output, which cannot be prefixed). Secondly, you could not search through syslog levels and facility in Papertrail.
A SolarWinds spokesperson offered this commentary on Loggly and Papertrail positioning:
"While both SolarWinds Papertrail and Loggly products do focus on logs and there may be some perceived overlap, we believe they address different use cases. Papertrail is well suited for the troubleshooting use case where live tailing through unstructured log data is critical. Loggly is best suited for customers that are looking for log monitoring and log analytics with structured log data and aggregated events."
The Loggly acquisition will add to SolarWind's existing portfolio of SaaS-based cloud monitoring solutions and SolarWinds plans to continue investing to innovate and enhance Loggly. Former Loggly executives Manoj Chaudhary, CTO and VP, Engineering, and Vito Salvaggio, VP, Product will join SolarWinds as leaders in engineering and product, respectively. Members of the core development, operations, support, sales, and marketing teams will transition as part of the transaction.
We're watching to see if or how SolarWinds extends the Loggly and Papertrail offerings into the SolarWinds MSP business unit.
