There is a role for both in a cloud native world.

While you can send log data directly to Wavefront, the primary use case there is to convert logs into metrics. VMware Log Insight can do some of this as well, but is a better place to data mine the log data.

Metrics and log monitoring are complementary. If you embrace the power of tracking everything that moves in your environment, then you’ve added instrumentation to likely thousands of places across your codebase.

Metrics give you an aggregated view over this instrumentation, and Wavefront can derive metrics from the log stream. Logs give you information about every single request or event, and the log data can be archived in log data mining tools for root cause analysis, debugging, and troubleshooting. Continue reading →