[sofixa]

Just to expand on this more - you don't have to use ELK which is pretty resource and maintenance heavy, there are much easier and faster alternatives that don't need attentive care.

Throw Loki+Grafana on a single VM somewhere (or run it on your Kubernetes/Nomad/ECS/etc. cluster) and it will get you very far, as long as you plan ahead a bit (most notably, indexing happens at ingestion, so you need to have an idea of what you want from your logs or your queries will be slower).

Or use a SaaS like logz.io, AWS OpenSearch, Datadog, etc. Most support OpenTelemetry now, so switching data ingestion is quite easy (unlike dashboards and alerts).

It makes sense to have centralised logs pretty much as soon as you outgrow the "everything runs on this one box and my DR plan is a prayer" stage, IMO.