A fundamental requirement for running applications is to have a centralized location to manage and review the logs. While manually reviewing logs could work with just a single node app server, once the deployment scales beyond one you need solution which can aggregate and centralize them for review.
Much like we do with Prometheus, GitLab can integrate with existing open source logging solutions to provide an integrated experience.
Being able to capture and review logs are an important tool for all users across the DevOps spectrum. From pure developers who may need to troubleshoot their application when it is running in a staging or review environment, as well as pure operators who are responsible for keeping production services online.
The target workflow includes a few important use cases:
The next step is to determine which solution we should base our aggregated logging solution on. One of the leading candidates is Loki, which we will be evaluating next.
This allows multiple time series to be represented in the same chart, that require different queries to generate. For example showing both the p95 and p99 buckets in the same chart.
Loggly and Elastic are the top two competitors in this space.
There does not seem to be a Forrester or Gartner analysis for this product category.
We will be reaching out and setting up meetings with analysts to get their insight soon.
