Explore: Your Faster, Easier Log Management UI is Here

Despite advances in the world of observability, log management hasn’t evolved much in recent years. In our webinar, Your Faster, Easier Log Management UI is Here, we share our vision for log management and provide a demo of Logz.io Explore, the new UI for our Log Management solution.

NOTE: Watch to the end of the replay to see an exciting new component of Logz.io that will be available soon!

TL;DR

In this webinar we share why we created Explore and give a full demonstration of its capabilities. We believe that Explore exceeds the performance and capabilities of open source counterparts in the logging world. Here’s why:

• Better speed.
  The search speed for logging queries in Explore is 4-5 times faster than OSD. This helps you get the information you need faster.
• Easier search.
  Our Intelligent Auto-Complete capability in Explore makes doing log queries a snap. Similar to a Google search, you enter in what you want to find and Explore will offer suggestions. This was more challenging in OSD, where you’d need to enter the exact search term to find what you were seeking. Additionally, users can try our Simple Search to find what they need and aren’t required to use Lucene query language—although that does remain available if desired.
• More intuitive.
  We’ve removed the complex menus and submenus in OSD and simplified the process of grouping and sorting what you search for in your logs. You can see the view of available fields, and the results—with the ability to resize the results table to what meets your needs.
• New grouping functionality.
  We’ve added a new “Group By” function in Explore. Instead of just showing the logs as a simple histogram without a lot of added context, this function allows you to see logs grouped by a particular field that you want to investigate—for example, you can group by specific errors that could be occurring in your logs. In OSD, this would require making an entirely new visualization and toggling between multiple screens. Instead in Explore this is easily created in one screen with a few clicks. 
• AI integration.
  Our AI-driven copilot, Observability IQ Assistant, automatically answers user queries about your data through the power of AI and extends the capabilities of your team and has been integrated into Explore. It’s effectively like having a junior-level developer working right in your product.

The Need for Modern Log Management

At Logz.io, we see observability practitioners struggling along multiple fronts in their journey. According to the 2024 Observability Pulse survey, only 10% of organizations are employing full observability, and we think the issues start with sorting through mountains of logging data.

This is reinforced by a poll of our webinar audience.

It’s a challenge to get all the logging information in one place, and then how to even effectively manage the logs is an entirely different beast. The nuances and complexities of open source tooling can cause issues in organizations—especially ones that are trying to ramp up more junior engineers and other team members. Getting all your logs in one place is one thing, but can you even look through the data in a way that makes sense of what’s happening in your critical infrastructure?

We heard the concerns among our customers about these issues, and we set out to make a better way. The creation of Explore, the dynamically-faster, more-intuitive UI for Logz.io’s Log Management solution came after months of research and development by our team.

Explore is intended to streamline the day-to-day work for SREs and developers around managing logs and drilling into data. Explore massively upgrades the speed and ease with which users can access their logs and the desired filters/information they want to see about them. 

Improving Upon Kibana and OpenSearch

We maintain great appreciation for open source observability tools, and we acknowledge that open source log management helped organizations arrive in a great place. Systems are more observable thanks to the work of those who built Kibana and the fork that later created OpenSearch.

But over time, we believe these tools have not kept up with modern use cases, and we’re excited to build on that for our customers. Adam Cazes, a member of our product management team who was instrumental in the development of Explore, put the difference between Explore and its Kibana/OSD predecessors in these simple terms:

“You can drive a BMW, or a beat up car from the ‘90s. Both can go 100 MPH, but they’re gonna feel a lot different getting there.” 

If you want to put your log management in the fast lane for good, try Explore. Sign up today for a free trial of Logz.io and see what a modern log management UI is all about.