[kevinr]

It depends a LOT on how many machines and services on the machines you're dealing with. There's a remarkable amount of stuff at the small end which is good, cheap, and fast to deploy.

I've been using Loggly for my personal machines (~8, mostly cloud VPSes). On the plus side, it's free at my scale, and the analysis and reporting tools are nice at least in theory. On the minus side, I can't get my logs past 7 days archived to S3 without paying $150/month, which I really want since my main use-case is longer-term analysis and forensics.

I'm planning to switch to Papertrail, which for the princely sum of $7/mo will give me a simpler UI and a year's archiving to S3.

Loggly and Papertrail both use the same deployment strategy (you hook them up to syslog and/or your app's logging package), and I had Loggly up and running and providing useful feedback in solidly under four hours.

[hobofan]

For small to medium log volume, I can only recommend Loggly.

The killer feature it has is for me is searching structured (JSON) logs. Just use the Logstash/Greylog library in the language of your choice and send the logs to Loggly, and you quickly have a logging system where you can zoom in on the logs comming from different subsystems of your codebase or produced by a specific user.