Fluentd vs SolarWinds Loggly

Fluentd is a free, open-source data collector for creating a unified logging layer. It uses JSON to handle log collection, filtering, buffering, and output across sources and destinations. More than 500 community plugins connect it to data sources and outputs, including Elasticsearch and Kibana, Splunk, AWS S3, Kafka, BigQuery, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry. It supports memory and file buffering, failover, and high availability to help prevent data loss between nodes. The project reports that a vanilla instance uses 30–40 MB of memory and can process 13,000 events per second per core. Fluentd v1 runs on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows; community distributions also include Docker images, a Kubernetes DaemonSet, and Ruby gems. It is self-hosted, and its components are available under the Apache 2 License. The project lists community help and commercial support from companies offering enterprise services. The homepage notes vulnerabilities patched in Fluentd v1.19.3 and advises updating fluent-package to v6.0.4.

SolarWinds Loggly is a cloud service for monitoring, analyzing, troubleshooting, visualizing, and reporting on logs, with collaboration features. It collects logs without proprietary agents and accepts syslog over TCP, UDP, or TLS, as well as HTTP/S. Sources include public and private clouds, AWS, Azure, hybrid environments, devices, containers, Linux, Windows, Mac, and serverless systems. Loggly automatically parses logs and provides search, filters, statistical analysis, field exploration, charts, dashboards, and surround search. It integrates with Slack, GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, custom webhooks, and other DevOps tools. The fully functional 30-day trial needs no credit card and includes Enterprise-tier features; afterward, the account converts to the free Lite package. Lite lists 200 MB per day and seven-day retention. Standard costs $79 a month, billed annually, and includes 1 GB per day with 15-day retention. Data is automatically and permanently deleted at the end of the retention period.