Kubernetes is an open-source, portable, and extensible container management system designed to automate the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications and services. Its rapidly growing ecosystem, strong community support, and global availability have made Kubernetes the most popular container management system currently available. As it tends to have multiple components that include moving clusters of services, servers, and containerized applications, it becomes challenging to get to the root cause of issues. In fact, it requires logging, monitoring, and analysis of more logs and discrete areas when something goes wrong.
Organizations should consider deploying a cloud-based log management solution to ensure the container logs are centralized, clusters are managed, and issues are resolved without wasting time and efficiency. Log management tools provide quick insights into Kubernetes cluster logs and enable teams to spot issues with advanced analytical capabilities.
Outlined below are what I think are the best log management tools for Kubernetes logging.
SolarWinds Papertrail
Managing Kubernetes clusters that generate decentralized container logs is difficult. Identifying and troubleshooting issues from huge volumes of scattered log data is even more challenging and requires centralization and continuous monitoring of logs.
SolarWinds® Papertrail™ is a cloud-based log management solution offering Kubernetes logging to streamline unorganized logs within clusters. It aggregates, analyzes, and monitors logs in real-time to help ensure applications run smoothly and error-free. With its live tail and advanced search capabilities, development teams can focus on important aspects and spot recurring patterns for faster troubleshooting of errors.
Additionally, Papertrail allows teams to visualize log data in its interactive graphs and dashboards to speed up the issue resolution process.
CloudWatch
CloudWatch is an AWS service designed specifically for DevOps engineers, IT teams, and developers to monitor and observe resources, applications, and services. It provides critical data logs and actionable metrics in its unified dashboards to help identify the root cause of issues, take automated actions to optimize resource utilization, and set alerts to reduce MTTR, improving system-wide performance.
With its machine learning algorithms, CloudWatch can monitor application and infrastructure stack, container ecosystem across Kubernetes, AWS ECS, and detect anomalous behavior quickly.
Fluentd
Fluentd is a free, advanced, and flexible tool with a unified logging layer to better analyze and understand data. The tool is extremely popular and reliable among data-driven organizations and is used by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and more for logging needs.
It uses data more efficiently by decoupling it with the back-end systems. With its high performance and quick capability to iterate, Fluentd is suited for Kubernetes logging. Additionally, the tool is simple and easy, with large community support and a plugin ecosystem.
The ELK Stack
ELK is one of the most popular open-source tools for log management. ELK’s components, which include Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, help simplify the entire Kubernetes logging process. Logstash allows ingesting of logs generated from distributed sources, which are then moved to Elasticsearch, a robust and scalable search engine. Additionally, Kibana enables developers to view crucial log information as charts and graphs for better analysis.
Moreover, the tool has a larger community that helps teams resolve issues through its knowledge base documents and by analyzing security events. The ELK stack provides greater flexibility and convenience to sort, aggregate, and find relevant logs for crucial logging requirements.
Sematext
Sematext is a log management solution that provides application monitoring, analysis, and full visibility of a system state. The tool can quickly detect errors and resolve performance and production-level issues with its advanced capabilities such as real -user monitoring. With its automated parsing features, Sematext can gather and parse several different log formats. The tool can also map and monitor the entire infrastructure along with components such as servers, containers, applications, and more.
Additionally, Sematext can fulfills an organization’s logging needs by combining monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting capabilities in one solution. Moreover, its intuitive real-time dashboards and useful integrations with other Sematext cloud tools make it a worthy choice for Kubernetes logging.
Conclusion
With the increasing adoption of microservices and containers, IT teams have to handle more services and server instances than ever before. It’s critical to choose the right monitoring tool. Highlighted above are what I think are the best log management tools that simplify and streamline logs generated by different Kubernetes clusters.
SolarWinds Papertrail offers real-time Kubernetes logging to aggregate, monitor, and analyze Docker logs, allowing teams to visualize the data in its interactive dashboards. Moreover, the tool is dynamic, easy to manage and deploy, and compatible with any Kubernetes cluster, including nodeless clusters.
To explore how Papertrail can help you find the finest details of the containerized clusters, download its free trial and discover the functionalities it offers.