Simon Willison’s Weblog

System Administration: What service/product do you recommend for central logging of events and errors from multiple servers? Why?

My answer to System Administration: What service/product do you recommend for central logging of events and errors from multiple servers? Why? on Quora

We rolled our own solution to this using MongoDB, due to its super-fast writes and ability to store, index and search JSON. We were also attracted by its capped collections, which make it easy to e.g. only log the last 100,000 items.

It hasn’t given us any problems, but we also haven’t spent the time to build a good UI for it do we aren’t getting as much value out of it as we could. That’s the disadvantage of rolling your own: you have to build the whole thing.