The Best CloudWatch Logs Viewer

A fast and intuitive log viewer for scanning and searching logs is essential when debugging serverless apps. While CloudWatch has many services, including a log viewer, they are hidden behind a challenging UI.

If you are frustrated with CloudWatch and serverless debugging, then SenseDeep provides a dramatically faster and more intuitive log viewer that has been designed for debugging serverless apps. SenseDeep leverages the underlying CloudWatch services, but provides an easier user interface that makes spelunking over your logs much less painful.

CloudWatch Logs

AWS CloudWatch is a convenient, unified logging solution so you can collect and access all your operational and performance data in one place. However, while the CloudWatch capture and storage facilities are excellent, the viewing and querying options are slow and limited.

I’ve tried a number of offerings that build upon the CloudWatch Logs service, but never found the experience I was looking for.

As a developer, I wanted:

• Speed and more speed to immediately scan thousands of log events without delay
• A fast live tail to see new log events as they arrived
• Powerful structured queries to quickly locate errors
• To be able to combine logs from multiple services or AWS accounts and regions

The AWS log console, while usable, is scoped to a single AWS account and region and is too slow to render and query log events. It takes up to 2-4 seconds to load page by page of log events. The CloudWatch Insights product is more powerful for queries, but can take over a minute for a single query.

To address these needs, and build upon the CloudWatch foundation, we designed the SenseDeep log viewer.

CloudWatch + SenseDeep

Here is a quick comparison of CloudWatch Logs and how SenseDeep augments these capabilities to offer a more complete logging solution.

More Secure Log Data

SenseDeep is dramatically faster than other solutions because it has a unique architecture. SenseDeep runs a lambda in your account called the SenseDeepWatcher which ingests log data and caches recent data in a high-performance logging database in your account. This means your log data is never shipped over the public internet to a 3rd party storage facility.

SenseDeep also intelligently pre-fetches log data to anticipate your needs. SenseDeep fetches log data in the background and caches it locally. As you scroll forward or backward, SenseDeep transparently fetches new log events to anticipate your need. With SenseDeep, events can be displayed, queried, and scrolled with lightning speed.

Links

• SenseDeep App