That's a good way to think about it! Heka was a big inspiration. The design isn't exactly the same, but we're aiming to solve a lot of the same problems.

There is also a Heka but in C.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/hindsight

Unfortunately deployment of Hindsight isn't as nice as Heka since you need to compile it yourself with all the Lua extensions you need, and the documentation is very disorganized.

Vector looks great on those counts, will be excited to try it if they get features like reliable Vector-Vector transport and more flexible file delimiters.

Hindsight isn't exactly heka in C; it's useful for data processing but not as a general-purpose log shipper. Currently we're using fluentd for the latter.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on the team that runs services used by firefox users and developers)