what is logs system
A logs system is the tooling and infrastructure used to collect logs from applications/hosts, ship them to a central place, optionally parse/enrich them, store/index them, and make them searchable (often with dashboards and alerting) for debugging, operations, and security.
Common building blocks:
- Collection agents (e.g., Fluent Bit, Filebeat, Vector)
- Ingestion/transport (e.g., syslog, HTTP, Kafka, OTLP)
- Processing pipelines (e.g., Logstash, Fluentd, Vector transforms)
- Storage/index (e.g., Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Loki, ClickHouse)
- Query/visualization/alerting (e.g., Kibana, Grafana)
Log system examples
- Amazon Elasticsearch
- Loki is a new project that claims “like Prometheus, but for logs.”
- Datadog
- OpenSearch
- Elastic Stack (ELK)
- Splunk
- Graylog
- Sumo Logic
- Papertrail
- Loggly
- AWS CloudWatch Logs
- Azure Monitor Logs (Log Analytics)
- Google Cloud Logging
- rsyslog / syslog-ng (host syslog daemons)