[theogravity]

Sometimes you don't have the resources or need to spin up an external collector. I might be in a situation where I want to collect logs with DataDog, but I also am not big enough nor would I have the time to set up a sidecar or configure the agent itself. It's possible you don't have access to the host environment to install something like an agent either (as you mentioned, like serverless functions).

The advantage for the in-app case is that it's fast to on-board with and doesn't require significant / any devops involvement compared to the above scenario.

One downside though is depending on how those logs get shipped, it might not scale well if you're writing an extreme frequency of logs (it's possible to reach HTTP limits with DataDog and New Relic log publish APIs in a high volume/frequency situation), and that's when you would want to move to and external collector that can process logs in a much more asynchronous fashion.

I'm not sure if the question is specific to LogLayer or just talking about logger transports in general that does in-app push, but I see the cloud collector features of LogLayer as something that you can easily add to your logging stack when you start out small and need it, but transition to an external collector later.

(One might argue that some OTEL tools can also do this, but as stated in another response, I'm not familiar enough to know if they'd do a better job or not in terms of the overall logging DX that LogLayer provides; their primary job is to ship logs from my understanding.)