[kiyoto]

I think you are conflating between the needs of centralizing logs and having them around at all. The OP is saying that always centralizing them might not always make sense, and I tent to agree (and I say this as someone who maintains a popular open source log collector)

If I were to play the devil's advocate, the real needs for raw log data in a centralized location is for folks outside of Ops: data analysts and data scientists.

[trjordan]

Log data should always be centralized if the machines they're stored on are ephemeral.

[jacques_chester]

All machines are ephemeral. Some people just don't realise it.

[jedberg]

Why? My whole point is that the data isn't useful beyond the life of the machine so why store it?