Re: PG vs ElasticSearch for Logs

On 8/19/2016 2:32 AM, Thomas Güttler wrote:
> I want to store logs in a simple table.
>
> Here my columns:
>
> Primary-key (auto generated)
> timestamp
> host
> service-on-host
> loglevel
> msg
> json (optional)
>
> I am unsure which DB to choose: Postgres, ElasticSearch or ...?
>
> We don't have high traffic. About 200k rows per day.
>
> My heart beats for postgres. We use it since several years.
>
> On the other hand, the sentence "Don't store logs in a DB" is
> somewhere in my head.....
>
> What do you think?
>
>
>

I played with ElasticSearch a little, mostly because I wanted to use
Kibana which looks really pretty. I dumped a ton of logs into it, and
made a pretty dashboard ... but in the end it didn't really help me, and
wasn't that useful. My problem is, I don't want to have to go look at
it. If something goes bad, then I want an email alert, at which point
I'm going to go run top, and tail the logs.

Another problem I had with kibana/ES is the syntax to search stuff is
different than I'm used to. It made it hard to find stuff in kibana.

Right now, I have a perl script that reads apache logs and fires off
updates into PG to keep stats. But its an hourly summary, which the
website turns around and queries the stats to show pretty usage graphs.

In the end, PG or ES, all depends on what you want.

-Andy