I was surprised to find there wasn't an Elasticsearch + Kibana competitor that is "simpler".
I just want to be able to store JSON logs with a timestamp + a bunch of fields then search them in a nice little UI later. Apparently, that's pretty hard to do right.
We ditched Elastic as it was a super massive PITA to operate (& a resource hog at that). I'll admit I'm not an expert at ELK at all, but tbh I was absolutely surprised just how bad Elastic + Kibana was for our basic log uses when they tout it as one of their mainstays. Or we were just exceptionally stupid, who knows. In any case, the experience we had with it didn't motivate us to become ELK experts at all. Our pet peeves:
- The Kibana UI needlessly wastes tons screen for whitespace
- makes it hard to dig down into logs
- never seems to find exact string matches when we wanted it to and instead returns "helpful" fuzzy matches
- Kibana has no qualms sending requests to Elastic that will happily kill your node instead of applying sensible paging / query timeouts. I mean that's why I'm using Kibana and not writing my own elastic frontend...
But Elasticsearch has evolved into a whole bunch of things to meet everyone's needs. There's a way to do what you want and simply, but you have to find the simple path in the middle of the big product.
I think the "simpler" version of ES+Kibana is probably a spreadsheet.
And only you can answer that fully.
There is S3+Athena for this with AWS and Google can store/query JSON with BigQuery. The nice little UI doesn't come with it, but at least you don't have to spin up an Elastic cluster.