What cheaper log analysis alternatives exist for PowerMTA users compared to SparkPost Signals?
Summary
What email marketers say14Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel uses Kibana on top of ElasticSearch, preferring bulk imports over Logstash for log ingestion.
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel recommends ELK stacks as a viable solution.
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel is looking for log analysis alternatives because SparkPost Signals license is expensive. He mentions exploring Logstash, Graylog, and Kibana.
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel confirms that you can build something similar to SparkPost Signals using dashboard tools with Logstash, Graylog and Kibana.
Email marketer from Email Geeks explains that ELK with filebeat can be useful for near-realtime data, showing what's happening as you deliver to a domain. However, he notes that ELK isn't comparable to a product with the R&D budget of Signals.
Email marketer from Reddit suggests Graylog as a powerful open-source alternative for log management, highlighting its ease of use and robust search capabilities.
Marketer from Email Geeks mentions that Filebeats performance was not great at scale when they rolled out their solution, so they use bulk imports instead. The lag is about 5 minutes and adequate. He agrees that it's not comparable to a dedicated solution.
Email marketer from Graylog.org mentions that Graylog is a leading centralized log management solution built to open standards for capturing, storing, and enabling real-time analysis of machine data.
Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that Grafana on top of ELK could provide dashboards and alerting but learning, setting, hosting and maintaining also has a cost.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that they use Kibana on top of ElasticSearch, using bulk imports rather than Logstash for moving logs into ElasticSearch.
Email marketer from Postmastery.com mentions Postmastery Delivery Analytics integrates all your delivery data into one dashboard for deep dive insight, empowering you to make quick, data-driven decisions and instantly optimize your email program.
Email marketer from Email Geeks uses Kibana + Elastisearch + Filebeats, but it's hard work to configure and adjust logs and dashboards and is also using Postmastery Delivery Analytics and is very satisfied.
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel suggests using Grafana on top of ELK for dashboards and alerting, but notes there are costs associated with setup and maintenance.
Email marketer from Email Geeks Slack Channel highlights ELK's capability for near-realtime data analysis using Filebeat, but acknowledges it's not a replacement for dedicated solutions.
What the experts say2Expert opinions
Expert from Spam Resource details using grep and similar tools to extract the delivery information from PMTA logs, highlighting that you can get details on bounces and deliveries using command line tools. It's noted that this is not as feature-rich but is included with PMTA.
Expert from Spam Resource mentions that PMTA includes tools to capture logging information. They further suggest using grep and other command line tools to analyze the resulting logs. These aren't as fancy as Signals, but they are included with PMTA and can be scripted.
What the documentation says3Technical articles
Documentation from Elastic.co describes Logstash as a server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from a multitude of sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to your favorite 'stash.'
Documentation from Elastic.co states Kibana lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. Give meaning to your data with features like histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support.
Documentation from Elastic.co states Elasticsearch as a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of solving a growing number of use cases. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores your data for lightning fast search, fine‑tuned relevance, and powerful analytics.