[pych]

It'll really depend on your use-case. If you're not doing _too much_ volume (less than 1-2TB) and you're willing to put in the work, ELK stack (as others mentioned) will be more cost-effective from a software cost perspective. You'll end up making up those costs in person-hours though, as you'll lose the benefits of managed/SaaS.

If you'd rather not spend the time managing an ELK stack, there's a lot of logging options (disclaimer: I work at one of them, https://logdna.com). It'd be helpful to unpack what you mean by "credible" competitors however. Our product, and most others in our space frankly, can't match Splunk in terms of feature-set today, so knowing what is most important to you would be helpful. For example, if you're looking for basic log storage and search, you'll have tons of options. If you need compliance, that would narrow the field a bit.

I'm happy to chat if you're interested in giving us (LogDNA) a shot or if you have other general questions, feel free to shoot me an email, I'm just peter@[ourcompanydomain]. I'm not in sales so I don't really have any incentive to push you towards us unless it makes sense, and a lot of our competitors have great products as well so happy to try and point you in the right direction.

[pych]

Quick follow-up on my last comment, if you're interested in trying us out, a few highlights: - don't need stress about structuring logs beforehand, we'll parse common log types automatically, parse JSON automatically, and you can create custom parsers after the fact - it takes two kubectl command to dump all your kubernetes logs onto us, and we'll add metadata after the fact like pod name, container name, namespace, etc (we also have a few dozen other integrations/ingestion options, of varying levels of quality/support) - we're responsive with customer feedback, and love to talk to customers about how we can make our product better

Hopefully that's helpful information!