In the tech industry, we obsess over the latest and greatest. When it comes to observability, we’re always looking at the most advanced hardware, the enthusiasts’ favorite systems, and the tech venture capital trends to get an idea of what to build for next. observIQ is no exception.

Stanza is a robust log agent. GCP users can use Stanza for ingesting large volumes of log data. Before we dive into the configuration steps, here’s a matrix detailing the functional differences between all the common log agents used by GCP users. Stanza was built as a modernized version of FluentD, Fluentbit, and Logstash. GCP users now have the ability to install Stanza to their VMs/ GKE clusters to ingest logs and route them to GCP log explorer.

There’s something wrong with the pricing of observability services. Not just because it costs a lot – it certainly does – but also because it’s almost impossible to discern, in many cases, exactly how the costs are calculated. The service itself, the number of users, the number of sources, the analytics, the retention period, and extended data retention, and the engineers on staff who maintain the whole system are all relevant factors that feed into the final expense.