The Best CloudWatch Logs Viewer
Frustrated with CloudWatch and Serverless debugging?
CloudWatch has many good services, but they are hidden behind a challenged UI.
SenseDeep uses the underlying CloudWatch services, but provides an easier user interface that makes spelunking over your logs much less painful. And with the SenseDeep Developer plan its FREE.
CloudWatch Logs
AWS CloudWatch is a convenient, unified logging solution so you can collect and access all your operational and performance data in one place. However, while the CloudWatch capture and storage facilities are excellent, the viewing and querying options are slow and limited.
I’ve tried a number of offerings that build upon the CloudWatch Logs service, but never found the experience I was looking for.
As a developer, I wanted:
- Speed to immediately scan thousands of log events without delay
- Live tail to see new log events as they arrived
- Powerful structured queries to quickly locate errors
- To be able to combine logs from multiple services or AWS accounts and regions
The AWS log console, while usable, is scoped to a single AWS account and region and is too slow to render and query log events. It takes up to 2-4 seconds to load page by page of log events. The CloudWatch Insights product is more powerful for queries, but can take over a minute for a single query.
To address these needs, and build upon the CloudWatch foundation, we designed the SenseDeep log viewer.
CloudWatch + SenseDeep
Here is a quick comparison of CloudWatch Logs and how SenseDeep augments these capabilities to offer a more complete logging solution.
| CloudWatch Logs | SenseDeep | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture Log Data | ||
| Retain Log Data | ||
| Manage Retention Policies | ||
| Log Viewer | basic | advanced |
| Time to show next page | > 1-2 seconds | < 1/100th second |
| Time to page through 1000 events | >20 seconds | <1/2 second |
| Automatically Aggregate Log Streams | ||
| Correlate and combine multiple log groups | ||
| Combine logs across AWS accounts and regions | ||
| Transparent Event Pre-Cache | ||
| Live Refresh and Live Tail | ||
| Infinite Smooth Scroll | ||
| Understand Structured Events | ||
| Filter and Query Events | Separate CloudWatch Insights | Integrated Javascript expressions |
| Save Log Views and View Formatting |
Cache Log Data in your Account
SenseDeep is dramatically faster than other solutions because it has a unique architecture. SenseDeep runs a lambda in your account called the SenseDeepWatcher which ingests log data and caches recent data in a high-performance logging database in your account. This means your log data is never shipped over the public internet to a 3rd party storage facility.
SenseDeep also intelligently pre-fetches log data to anticipate your needs. SenseDeep fetches log data in the background and caches it locally. As you scroll forward or backward, SenseDeep transparently fetches new log events to anticipate your need. With SenseDeep, events can be displayed, queried, and scrolled with lightning speed.
Links
Try SenseDeep
Start your free 14 day trial of the SenseDeep Developer Studio.
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