Quick! Name a log analysis service. If the first word that popped out of your mouth was “Splunk,” you’re far from alone.
But Splunk’s success has spurred many others to up their log-analysis game, whether open source or commercial. Here is a slew of contenders that have a lot to offer sysadmins and devops folks alike, from services to open source stacks.
Elasticsearch (ELK stack)
The acronym “LAMP” is used to refer to the web stack that comprises Linux, the Apache HTTP web server, the MySQL database, and PHP (or Perl, or Python). Likewise, “ELK” is used to describe a log analysis stack built from Elasticsearch for search functionality, Logstash for data collection, and Kibana for data visualization. All are open source.
Elastic, the company behind the commercial development of the stack, provides all the pieces either as cloud services or as free, open source offerings with support subscriptions. Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana offer the best alternative to Splunk when used together, considering that Splunk’s strength is in searching and reporting as well as data collection.
