By the time you want centralized logs, you are probably already spending much more than the logging will cost on infrastructure.
What you're doing here is constructing a straw man argument while agreeing with the same point I was making.
> > ship log events out of the box and into something searchable, indexable, and can derive metrics
> That's just a way to spend a ton of money. There's really not a reason to ship or index logs...
That's what I said. ;)
> One of the ways to make it seem a reasonable suggestion is the broader topic of not logging into machines at all, ever, and why that may be a good thing.
Except none of that was being discussed. Only log access.
> They're explicitly talking about not logging into machines for log access.
Why can't you just admit that you didn't read the thread properly rather than insulting all of our intelligence with these piss poor mental gymnastics where you redefine the context of what people had very clearly written.
The conversation you're replying to, however, did. I know this for a fact because I was involved in that conversation and I made that distinction myself ;)
I'd rather not engage in pointless unprovable arguments, if you don't mind.
> The problem is that you are treating your logs as pets when the truth is the logs are also cattle. Virtually all debug logs will pass through their life cycle without being read, so indexing them is just a flagrant waste of energy.
You shouldn't have debugging enabled on production systems unless you have an interim process that filters out debug messages before they get indexed (and thus you can toggle which logs get indexed there rather than reconfiguring / redeploying all of your application nodes).
Also nobody is suggesting logs should be treated as "pets". You still want to purge out older logs however the problem is you cannot always replicate reported errors so if you don't have those log messages captured then you're sod out of luck.
Don't get me wrong, there is a certain allure to the traditional method of systems administration - I've been on both sides of the fence - but central logging services have so many other benefits such as security (tamper proof logs, users don't require SSH), ease of use, persistent logging, etc. The only real downside is cost but that quickly becomes absorbed in your pricing plan when customers start asking for SLAs.