SolarWinds Loggly

What do you like best?

The advertised feature list looks solid.

However, when you try to actually use the feature, you realize they are awfully designed, implemented, and rarely work as you expect.

The dashboard can be good if you manage to jump through all required hoops to make it work.

What do you dislike?

First of all, it's just impossible to use effectively if you just want to look into logs as you normally would.

A lot of boilerplate UI around actual messages makes it hard to read logs when it works.

Often it just doesn't load the log and it doesn't seem to due to incidents, it's just how it works in general, unreliably.

If you try to localize the timeframe to filter only relevant messages you will fail too. The UI is just awful.

Alerts - are awful. You cannot have just 1 alert for 1 event, due to their way of implementing & designing this feature alerts always spam you.

Last week I tried to add a user and got an error, the feature just wasn't working at all. And it happens all the time, something just is not right there.

When a prod incident happens and I try to use Loggly to figure it out in about 10% of cases it just doesn't help due to one bug or another.

Sometimes it works though yes. When it does it's just not unusable like I say if you wish to review the log.

We usually just figure out which server generated the error (if we can) and head to the specific server to look into the file log instead of loggly.

The log tail - you cant filter it. Why you'd wonder? Because.

Text search in filtered context - you cant text search in filtered context, because the filtered context loads asynchronously.

So you need to scroll down first, to make filtered context searchable, and scroll down works slow and buggy.

Back-forward navigation in the browser. Due to bad implementation usually, you cannot get back to where you'd expect by pressing back.

Which makes navigation another pain.

The most surprising thing about Loggly is that it's been like this last 5 years, nothing improves.

The role-based access system is awful, it doesn't work as you'd expect. You have to jump through various hoops to make things work as you wish in terms of role-based access to various logs or charts.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Consider alternatives, its hard to imagine there are no better options.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Consolidating various logs from different machines to one centralized place.

Get alerts if errors happen, watch dashboards of user activity.