Solarwinds® Kiwi Syslog® Server is a syslog management tool for network and systems engineers. It receives syslog messages and SNMP traps from network devices (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.), and Linux®/Unix® hosts. Users can filter and view these messages based on time, hostname, severity, etc., and set up custom alerts. Kiwi Syslog Server has built-in actions to react appropriately to syslog messages. There are also log archival and clean-up features to help comply with security policies.
$319
Per Instance
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.
The SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server does what it's supposed to do. It's a bare-bones Syslog Server. If your company is just trying to fulfill security requirements or doesn't need all the advanced features of a product such as Splunk, then Kiwi will work well and not break the bank. Using the tool is very straightforward as there aren't a lot of options outside of just viewing logs.
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you
Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
Easy to install set up and train users on.
The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.
Log Aggregation and uploading. The architecture for Sumo Logic makes a great deal of sense and works very well.
Automated analysis. It still impresses me how well a newly uploaded log can be broken into intelligent parts, then searched and sorted using their tools.
Dashboards. It might not be what YOU will need as an IT admin, but you can give access to these dashboards easily to business users who love that kind of stuff. Most other types of (monitoring / alerting) tools, for no apparent reason, lack this feature.
Reporting, monitoring, and graphing. Given, you need to have useful log generation for an application or service as a prerequisite for sumo logic to be able to gain use, once it has it is an amazingly powerful tool.
Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.
Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.
Because the solution is so simple to use and implement, support wasn't very necessary. The one time I did call them to better understand where logs were stored, they were very helpful and friendly. Kiwi has been around for some time and not a lot has changed over the years, so support for it is pretty straightforward and quick.
I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.
I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.
Syslog-ng don't have customer support or technical support .But its a free software and no clarity on limitations ingestion bandwidth. No gui feature and everything should be done from backend. Gui can easily help to start and stop service ,easy to configure. Unlimited technical and customer support . Even when server got shutdown will get on-call or immediate support that will helps a lot to resolve errors
We had used Splunk previously. Sumo Logic defeats them when it comes to cost, including the costs that would normally come with supporting/managing/patching/upgrading your own infrastructure and storage. Those were wins, but especially the real-time CDN integrations due to Sumo Logic's collaborations with other vendors. We had spoken to Logentries and discovered that many of the cons we found with Sumo Logic seemed to have been resolved in their product. Their pitfall was that, at the time, Logentries did not have the ability to get real-time log ingestion from our CDN. They said they had a solution, which was scripted, but we had not evaluated/tested. Logentries also did not have a User / RBAC REST API, and are nowhere near the level of compliance that Sumo Logic had (https://www.sumologic.com/press/2015-02-19/sumo-logic-successfully-completes-pci-data-security-stand...). In the end, I believe Logentries and Sumo Logic would be two good vendors to get involved in a bake-off
