Logz.io Reviews

Our primary use case is to monitor the live game observability. When our game is live, we can see how the servers are performing and how players are connecting around the world. Generally, we just monitor everything to make sure the stability is running smoothly. 

The secondary use of it is when we have things we want to dig deeper into, then we have a backup of the logging system. We can jump from a point in the metrics of the observability to a point in logging in which it happened, then observe what the server saw at that time in order to diagnose and fix whatever the issue might be.

Lockdown and COVID-19 made it impossible to go to work anymore. Having a central place where everybody could have a login, then we could share, take snapshots of graphs, or send people live data. Then, if anybody wants to know, they can just go and have a look for themselves. They don't have to ask us, "What is the state of the services like?" or, "What does the player population look like?" We don't have to answer those questions. People can just go and find the answers by looking at it themselves. Also, the customization means we can very quickly build graphs to analyze data or check something out. If somebody else wants something else that isn't there, then it is a very quick turnaround to add it very quickly.

Logz.io is useful for helping us to correlate between our log, metrics, and tracing data. They are integrated altogether, so we have our observability metrics dashboard with a link in there. You click it, then it goes to the logs. It is a holistic approach to having everything together. 

It has definitely improved our troubleshooting: To have visibility on what is going on so we can identify things as early as possible. The alerting system is super powerful and hooked up to all our systems so we get alerts. Whenever there is an inkling of a problem, we know about it. That is just incredibly useful rather than having to wait for someone to tell us, which is theoretically what the old world used to be like: Someone would have to notice. Now, we can build alerts in it and the solution will tell us. 

For anyone who uses it, Logz.io has increased their productivity. There is no restrictive policy on who can go and find out some basic information or look at graphs. Our design team, customer service team, engineering team, and executive team can all look at it from different levels. They can just go to the dashboard or graph where they want to see the information, without having to ask anybody. This adds a layer of transparency and demystifies a lot of stuff going on, which helps productivity for the sheer fact that anyone can see it. There is a lot of data in Logz.io to be consumed, but it is very clearly laid out and not confusing.

The most valuable feature is the tight integration they have between services that they provide. In our use case, it is great to see all the observability metrics, but also be able to go from that high-level view of important stats that we have deliberately recorded down into the low level of any particular time or server to see exactly what was happening at that moment, when we saw whatever we saw in the metrics.

They have the logging and metrics all in one platform. They are all tightly tied together, so we can look at the metrics and logs at the same time. They have features in there that tie the integration together. This makes them one product as opposed to three. This is super important to us. We were originally looking for something that did just the observability stuff, but then they also had something that did the logging, and we were like, "Well, this solves two problems for us at the same time." They have other features too, but they weren't within our requirements at the time. It was more valuable than having to find two products that did the same thing. It has such tight integration, support, training. etc. It has just made it super easy for us to use because we only have to write one integration.

We use Logz.io's Log Patterns and Drop Filters all the time. The Drop Filters are amazing and hugely beneficial. The Log Patterns are just so useful. We don't have to do any work to set them up. We can just start the main log, then I just say, "Could you parse this into this particular format?" They do. Then, I instantly have all this data coming through, formatted in a way that I need it, which is really useful. We didn't have to think about that upfront. We just look at it afterwards, and say, "Okay, this is really useful."

One of those areas would be allowing it to have public dashboards where you don't need a login. The reason is if we were in a studio right now, we would have a big screen TV with the dashboards on it. That would mean someone would have to log into it. Right now, it is not a problem. However, in the future, this will be. We will want these dashboards on big TVs so we can just visually see the state of the world. You have to log in right now to see anything. Whereas, it would be nice if we could have a link to a dashboard that we could give to anybody without having to log in. That way, we can put it into a kiosk. So, we could put it into a kiosk mode, then just have graphs on a big screen all the time without having to log in. That is a feature that would be great to have and a feature that I have asked for a couple of times.

I would like granularity on alerting so we can get tentative alerts and major alerts, then break it down between the two, but they do have a lot of good alerting stuff in there already.

I have been using it for about a year.

It has been super stable. There were some stability issues in Q1 this year. Other than that, it has been super stable. They were really aware of them and let us know when there are stability issues. There is a whole status monitoring page where we get alerts from if they are stability issues. 

They are aware that we find it important that it has stability and uptime. I don't think we have ever had a cause where we thought, "This is actually bad." 

It was just unfortunate that it did have a stability issue, rather than catastrophic. We put massive amounts of data through to them last yeah, and it was very tolerant and stable. When there was minor stability issues they were very attentive and their support team was fully available. Stability-wise, we have been very happy with it. It is certainly well within any SLAs.

We scale up on the amount of data that we send them. If we want to, we could also just scale it back. This is good because we don't feel like we are strangled by the contract, costs, etc. We feel pretty free to use it as we need to.

The technical support is the best. They have an app just embedded in their site, where you can just click on it, type in a request, and then they respond really quickly. We also have access to them via email, and they will respond super quickly. If we feel like it is super urgent, and we really want that red button to press, then they respond very quickly.

I haven't got anything to compare this solution to right now, because any solution I have ever used has always been a home-brewed one. The value this solution has is measurable in that it is a fundamental thing we use now, and I look at it daily to see what is going on. I can't give you a monetary value to it, but it's definitely something that I wouldn't want to be without.

Previously, I never used a service like this. It normally was in-house. However, we didn't want to make another home-grown solution. We were really looking for something that could solve our problem, and we just happened upon Logz.io. This solution was actually recommended to me by someone I know at another company, and it was a good recommendation.

All home-grown solution used to take time to set up. We needed people with knowledge in that area of expertise, i.e., ELK stack. Generally, we needed a full-time person to integrate it, set it up, manage and monitor it. Even if that work tapers off a bit, there was always a maintenance cost to it. It is useful to be able to offload that into a service that has these features plus additional integration features that we don't necessarily want to write ourselves.

It has removed a lot of stress. Anybody can go and look for stuff. We don't feel that we have a black box so much as we have complete control over what we see and do. We can just put anything we want in, being able to see more (or less) information if we wanted. I can't imagine how I ever worked without it before. I never thought it would be that useful, but it certainly is. I wouldn't want to start another game project/product without it. It is crazy useful.

Logz.io has massively reduced our troubleshooting time. Before we had this in play, for some of the testing phases that we went through, we used to manually collect all the logs from the servers then run Python scripts over them in order to produce the data that we wanted. Now, we don't do that at all. That is potentially four hours a week per team until the end of a playtest that is just completely absorbed. So, half a person's day went away just by having this solution in place. 

It is massively useful and great for testing. We can just go, find logs, and attach them easily. It has a very quick lookup. Whereas, before we would have to go, dig around, and find the server that the logs were connected to, then go to the server, download the log, and attach it. Now, we can just go straight to this solution, type in the log ID and server ID, and obtain the information that we want.

You pay for what you need, and that is a good model. They are also quite happy to talk to you about your uses and your use case. They will even go as far as suggesting things that you don't need to do in order to save you money. At one point, I was quite surprised at how cheap it could be if we wanted it to be or how much they would help us manage our costs. 

This was probably a good sales approach, but it is definitely true that they will look at stuff, and say, "We think you could save money by not necessarily doing this," and, "You don't need to do this," and, "The Drop Filters are the same. You will save money by doing this." Then, they put that feature in there to help you save money. This is a really good way of doing it because it also means that we can run as many services as we want without having to worry about scaling up. 

It is more than comparable to other solutions. There are a couple other solutions that I have looked at and reviewed during our due diligence, and price was secondary to features in a lot of ways. 

Logz.io is great. For any other project we create it will be one of the staple products where I will say, "We should just start with this upfront, as opposed to trying to find another solution later or reassessing it, because there is no reason not to start with the product right now." Then, we will find its niche for whatever it is we are making in the future. I think this solution is super useful. It is a common go-to for a lot of the team who use it.

We use the solution’s AI-powered Insights feature, but not as heavily as maybe we should. It is definitely interesting to see what is going on and what the AI-powered Insights are telling us is going on. That can be really useful. We don't necessarily look at AI-powered Insights for troubleshooting and root cause. We are looking at it more to tell us something it thinks is going on. I will look at Insights maybe once a week, and say, "Oh, I get it. This is interesting. This is a new thing that seems to be happening. Let's have a look, see if we can dig down, and determine why it is coming up with that insight." If we see a lot of problems, then we go and look at Insights first. Normally, we are too busy trying to diagnose problems to think about Insights. While it is a good feature, we probably don't lean on it enough.

I would rate this solution as a solid nine out of 10.

One of our customers uses it as a central logs aggregation point. We forward over logs from our customer environment in AWS to Logz.io. We use it to carry out dashboarding and analytics as well as for carrying out some alarming for certain scenarios and events. Essentially, it is a centralized log platform for a customer solution.

We use Logz.io for cloud monitoring. I predominantly work in the cloud. That is all I have worked in over the last 10 years or so.

Our team doesn't spend time setting up, managing, and tuning a logging platform. It frees them up to spend time on higher value pieces of work. A customer is getting a much higher value for their money. It allows our people to focus on the high-value business change work. Before, we would have been managing that on a daily basis and that would have taken up a certain percentage of the team's time. These platforms aren't exactly easy to manage and can be quite complex, especially when it comes to the scale.

The speed of getting up to speed, but we also don't have to manage it on a daily basis. We don't have to worry about scaling it or doing any additional security. It just works. We trust them to keep the platform online.

It auto scales. Whenever we have a peak in logs, we don't need to touch it. We just know that Logz.io will handle it.

I like that it is all open-source tooling under the hood. We have a lot of experience with this. Therefore, we could get up and running very quickly with it, knowing that it is all open technology. Having that there in a single platform and out-of-the-box has been really beneficial for us.

We use Logz.io’s AI-powered Insights feature for errors. It finds certain patterns, so we use it to pick out certain unusual events. It is really helpful because it separates real events from the noise. Typically, with these monetary platforms, you might be transmitting slices of events every second or minute. It is very difficult sometimes to pick out anomalies, but this has definitely simplified the process. It is helpful as well for debugging because we can tie it back to specific events in our platform.

We use Logz.io's Log Patterns and Drop Filters very heavily. They are based on open source technology with which we have experience. So, it helps refine our logging to cut out all the noise, giving us a really good signal-to-noise ratio. We are not paying for storage that we don't need. We are only logging the necessary logs on what you are able to drop, such as all the noisy platforms with all the logs that you don't care about. We run in Kubernetes, which is a very noisy computing platform. Having dropped others really helped us save costs.

I would like them to improve how they manage releases. Some of our integrations integrate specifically with set versions. Logz.io occasionally releases an update that might break that integration. On one occasion, we found out a little bit too late, then we had to roll it back. In those rare situations, the customer team were all over it. They helped us get back online again. They should enable customers to manage updates themselves, e.g., give my team the choice whether we want to upgrade and when. That way, we can manage it a little bit more effectively on our side. This is the only thing where they could improve. This is based on an experience a year ago, so my information might be a little bit out of date.

I have been using it since early 2019.

The stability has been good. I can't really think of many notable outages that we have experienced at all. I find it a very reliable, available, performant solution

it is all automatic on the back-end. In addition, if we have some unusual activities expected in advance, and we have a bunch of them coming up on a certain day, Logz.io works with us to make sure that we have all the elasticity that we needed for that specific one-off event. Auto scaling works for the most part, but they give you that little bit of extra comfort by being there on your lunch day to make sure that the system can easily cope with any single issue brought.

There are anywhere between five to 15 using it who might be developers, architects, support personnel, DevOps platform engineers, and security people. Any of the technical people on a project will be using Logz.io.

The other nice thing about Logz.io is their team. When it comes to onboarding, their support is incredibly proactive. They bring the brand experience from a customer services perspective because their team is always there to help you refine filters and tweak dashboards. That is really a useful thing to have. Their engagement is really supportive.

Previously, in all my other customer engagements, we built our own tools. This involved deploying the software, configuring and managing it. Therefore, we have good experience with the underlying technology.

The initial setup is extremely simple.

It can be deployed at speed. Within a few hours, we had a working ELK Stack and Kibana stack. 

Instead of my team having spent a couple of weeks building it, we got in touch with Logz.io. They had it deployed in a very short space of time without much effort at all from my team.

You give them some high-level requirements. They deploy some test endpoints. We hook up the integrations and away we go. We were up in less than a day, where we would have taken probably a couple of weeks to get online if we had to do it ourselves.

Logz.io had a person dedicated to us, helping us get online. This was a really good layer of service.

We knew what we needed. Because we had that knowledge, it was very quick to engage and tell them what we needed to get it working. If we didn't know what we're doing, their team would be very helpful in helping us. They would make sure that the solution is what it needs to be to solve a problem. They are not just going to set up something that isn't going to work for our needs.

The development could have been done with one person.

Logz.io reduces our hosting costs and team effort. It has provided a better return on investment for our customer.

You are definitely saving a good few hours a week in terms of maintenance off the platform.

Logz.io reduced our troubleshooting time. 

At the time it was set up, we thought Logz.io was very reasonable for what we were getting in terms of how much time and hosting costs it was saving us, because you don't have to run the servers for it anymore. However, it has been a couple of years since I have looked at the cost.

There are no additional costs unless you want to use one of their add-on services, e.g., security services, which we don't need. We find their pricing strategy very transparent and adaptable. That has made things much easier for us.

Make the best use of the support services Logz.io provides. The customer concierge is there to make sure that you are onboarded correctly. Your customer success manager and technical point of contact are very helpful. They will really speed up your implementation on your configuration. Make best use of the people that they make available to you.

Logz.io is being used every day by the team on a customer project. They log in everyday to look at logs and dashboards as well as search logs. This is a really important part of the toolkit that we provide to our customer through our teams.

I would rate Logz.io as a nine out of 10.

We have a product that our customers are using on their servers, and we stream all the logs from our services that are on those servers to Logz.io. We do analysis of the logs and we also have alerts if we don't have enough logs or if a certain log is not arriving and then we know that there's a problem with the server.

The infrastructure is comfortable to use and work with and Logz.io has helped us in managing our logs better and improving our logging system.

The visualizations in Kibana are the most valuable feature. It's much more convenient to have a visualization of logs. We can see status really clearly and very fast, with just a couple of clicks.

The solution’s Drop Filters are currently helping us filter out logs that we're not sure whether we want to eliminate completely or not. The solution is great because it gives us a middle ground where we don't have to decide right away if we want to stop streaming the logs or hold onto them longer. That helps drive cost-efficiency when logging within Logz.io.

We're mainly doing correlations either within Kibana or within the metrics, and that is also helping us.

When it comes to reducing our troubleshooting time, it depends. When there are no bugs in Logz.io, it reduces troubleshooting by 5 to 10 percent. When there are bugs, it increases our troubleshooting time by 200 percent or more.

Also, the API could be more stable.

I've been using Logz.io for a year.

In the past year we've had four major incidents, so I would say the stability is average.

The support could be more reachable and help more when it comes to bugs. I don't get assistance from their support when I approach. I would rate them at five out of 10.

The availability of the customer success personnel from Logz.io who work with our company is amazing, but when it comes to the tech support tech, while the first response is fast, the rest of the conversation can take a while, and then I have to check with them about what is going on because I don't get information.

It took a couple of weeks to implement the solution in our company.

The implementation and usage are good once you figure them out but sometimes the beginning can be hard. Once you get it, it's okay.

We have 10 developers who are working with logs and we have two developers who are developing all the infrastructure around logs. We have about 10 people who are using their Kibana product.