Frequently asked questions

• What is Loggly?

  Loggly is a SaaS solution for unified log analysis and monitoring. With our service, you’re able to bring logs and metrics from the depths of your entire infrastructure to one place where you can track activity and analyze trends. Best of all, because Loggly is a managed service, you don’t need any additional hardware or software to start using Loggly. Your monitoring solution dynamically scales with your operation.

• What is Loggly for?

  Software development, DevOps, technical operations, sysadmins, customer service, and product management teams regularly use Loggly. Anyone who can gain insight from operational software data will want to use Loggly. The most common uses include proactive application monitoring, troubleshooting server and application issues, log analytics, performance monitoring, and alerting.

• Why do I need Loggly when I already have a monitoring solution like Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, or SignalFx?

  Logs provide a current and historical record of everything that has happened with your application and infrastructure. While APM and metrics tools use logs in some ways, they do not provide the complete visibility across your system architecture that logs provide. In fact, while some of these tools offer one or more solutions alongside logs, only Loggly provides a unified solution with powerful log analysis along with monitoring through metrics and the occurrence of specific events.

• What kind of logs can I send and how do I get them to Loggly?

  If it logs, it can log to Loggly. We’ll take any text-based data, including logs from Apache, AWS, Microsoft Azure, C/ C++, Docker, Java, JavaScript, logstash, MySQL, Nginx, PHP, Python, Ruby, nxlog, rsyslog, syslog-ng, Snare, Tomcat, routers, switches, and more. Logs can be sent over Syslog TCP, Syslog UDP, Syslog TCP w/ TLS, or HTTP/S. Any system or process that has access to the Internet can forward log data. For systems that don’t have Internet access, you can simply set up a proxy to forward the logs.

• What platforms does Loggly work with?

  If your platform has access to the Internet, it’s possible to log to Loggly. We have logs coming from all flavors of Linux, Windows, Mac, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, embedded systems, hardware appliances, and client applications. We’ve also worked with various PaaS providers, such as AWS, Heroku, Microsoft Azure, and others to get your logs drained and captured in Loggly.

• Is Loggly use limited to applications running on Amazon Web Services?

  Not at all. Logs can come from anywhere, whether it’s your own data center, a public cloud, a colocation facility, a user’s browser or mobile phone, etc.

• How do I get data to you?

  Write your logs in real time over either syslog or HTTP. Most systems have an agent already installed that can forward logs. There are a number of ways to configure log forwarding and we’ll walk you through the best method for your infrastructure configuration.

• Do you have a collector agent that I need to install?

  No. Loggly is completely agent-free. We work with existing standards like syslog and HTTP so you can use the software you already have.

• How much bandwidth will I need to send events to Loggly?

  It depends on how much log data you have, but a good rule of thumb is that sending 100GB of log data per day would use around 10Mbps of bandwidth.

• How long does it take before an event sent to Loggly shows up in my account (i.e., how real time are you)?

  Log events will generally show up within 20 seconds. We consider ourselves near-real time.

• Does Loggly have an API?

  Yes, indeed. Key Loggly functions are available via the web interface or via our RESTful API. You can use the API to make Loggly an integral part of your operations monitoring and management function.

• When does Loggly parse logs, and how?

  Loggly parses many standard event types immediately after it ingests your log data. You can view the link of standard event types here. The parsing process identifies different fields depending on the type of log. For example, an Apache log would include parsing on referring URL and status code, while a JSON log would include parsing on serialized data and common key-value pairs. In addition, Loggly Derived Fields enable you to set up your own custom parsing rules that run at ingestion time.

• What kinds of metrics can Loggly capture and visualize?

  Loggly can generate metrics from almost any type of log. For structured data like JSON, Loggly recognizes numeric fields and is able to calculate:
  
  Sum – Addition of all numbers in the selected field in the set of events
  matching the query.
  Average – Sum of all numbers divided by the count of all the numbers.
  Maximum – Largest value in the set of events.
  Minimum – Lowest value in the set of events.
  Standard deviation – The square root of the variance.
  Percentile – The value below where the selected percentage of events falls.
  
  For non-numeric fields, Loggly can calculate event counts on field values.
  
  You can also send Amazon CloudWatch metrics to Loggly.
  

• Am I limited on the number of dashboards I can build?

  No, customers with Standard, Pro, and Enterprise plans and above can create as many dashboards as they like! Trial users also have unlimited access to dashboards.

• Can I restrict certain users from seeing certain data or dashboards?

  Yes, Loggly offers several features to restrict visibility to certain people. You can create source groups, distinct or overlapping groups of logs, and assign users to only see specific ones. In addition, you can control users’ access to specific charts and dashboards.

• What browsers does Loggly support?

  Loggly works with all modern browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but we recommend Chrome.

• How secure is my data?

  There are a few ways to send data securely – either over syslog TLS or HTTPS. We store your data in data centers that are ISO and SOC2 certified, and we practice top industry-standard security measures. When you retrieve your data, all interactions are within secure sessions encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

• What if I need access to my logs that are outside of my retention period?

  Our Pro and Enterprise subscriptions offer archiving to Amazon Web Services S3 buckets for long-term storage of your logs. The S3 bucket is a separate product maintained through AWS.

• What’s the difference between Loggly and an Application Performance Management system?

  APM solutions provide valuable insights into application performance; you can know what’s happening via various performance metrics. Loggly provides complementary metrics based on log data along with deep-dive capabilities so that you can answer the "why" questions that you may have as you look at the “what” from APM metrics.

• Does Loggly integrate with my other DevOps tools?

  Yes. Loggly offers a variety of integrations to support team collaboration, including:
  Atlassian JIRA Software
  Atlassian HipChat
  GitHub
  Microsoft Teams
  New Relic
  OpsGenie
  PagerDuty
  Slack
  Your own Webhook-compatible software, and more!