I wanted to get more detailed logging and have it available to my team and I so I can do postmortem analyzing of transactions after they were completed. This could help me discover what data was actually sent by the user, what the SQL query was (if any), the resource requested, and what the status code returned was. I needed this both for my web app code as well as for my API, and I needed to be able to search through both of them to find specific transactions.
First step was to choose a logging platform. I had several criteria that I used while evaluating each logging product.
1. Ease of Install
2. Ease of Maintenance
3. Low cost of entry
4. Great Search functionality
5. API to pull out data from.
I would like to stress here that I am in no way a sysadmin and only know enough to be dangerous! I narrowed my choices to 2, Splunk and Loggly. Here is what I found:
