Log Management Made Easy with BetterStack

BetterStack is an infrastructure monitoring platform designed to be beautifully simple and powerful. Its core mission is to unify all the tools you need to understand the health of your applications and infrastructure into a single, cohesive product.

Instead of stitching together separate services for logging, monitoring, and alerting, Better Stack combines them. They are often seen as a more modern, developer-friendly, and cost-effective alternative to complex enterprise solutions like Datadog, Splunk, or setting up your own ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.

As of June 2025, their platform is built on three main pillars:

1. Logs (formerly Logtail)

This is arguably Better Stack’s most popular feature. It’s a centralized log management platform built for speed and ease of use.

• Core Idea: It aggregates all your logs—from servers, applications, containers, cloud providers, etc.—into one place.
• Key Feature (SQL Querying): This is their killer feature. Instead of forcing you to learn a proprietary query language (like Splunk’s SPL or Grafana’s LogQL), you query your logs using standard SQL. This is incredibly intuitive for most developers and drastically lowers the learning curve.
• Performance: The backend is powered by ClickHouse, a high-performance analytical database. This allows Better Stack to offer blazing-fast search speeds, capable of querying billions of lines of logs in seconds.
• Ease of Use: It has over 100 integrations for popular services like Vercel, Docker, Kubernetes, and Node.js, making setup a breeze. It automatically parses common log formats into structured JSON data.

2. Uptime Monitoring

This pillar focuses on a simple question: “Is my service online?”

• Core Idea: It constantly checks your websites, APIs, and servers from multiple locations around the world to ensure they are available and responding correctly.
• Key Features:
  • Multi-location checks: Confirms if a downtime is global or just a regional network issue.
  • Rich Monitors: Goes beyond a simple “ping.” It can check for specific HTTP status codes, look for keywords on a page, monitor SSL certificates, and even run Playwright scripts for end-to-end user flow testing.
  • Error Details: When a service goes down, it doesn’t just tell you it’s down. It provides a screenshot, error logs, and response headers to help you debug immediately.
  • Status Pages: Lets you easily create beautiful, public status pages to communicate downtime and maintenance to your users, building trust.

3. Incident Management & On-call

When the Uptime monitor detects a problem, this is the system that ensures the right person is notified and the issue is resolved.

• Core Idea: It combines on-call scheduling with a robust alerting and incident response workflow.
• Key Features:
  • On-call Scheduling: You can set up on-call rotations directly in your favorite calendar app (like Google Calendar).
  • Smart Alerting: Alerts are sent via Slack, SMS, phone calls, and email. You can create escalation policies—if the primary on-call person doesn’t acknowledge an alert, it automatically escalates to the next person or team.
  • Incident Timelines: Every incident gets a detailed timeline that tracks what happened, who was alerted, and what actions were taken. This is invaluable for collaboration during an outage and for post-mortems afterward.

How It All Works Together: A Real-World Scenario

The true power of Better Stack is how these three pillars are seamlessly integrated:

1. Detect: The Uptime monitor detects that your /api/checkout endpoint is returning a 500 error.
2. Alert: An incident is automatically created in the Incident Management tool. It checks the on-call schedule and immediately sends an alert to the on-call developer via a Slack message and a phone call.
3. Debug: The developer clicks a link in the Slack alert. This link takes them directly to the Logs platform, pre-filtered to the exact timeframe when the 500 errors started occurring. Using SQL, they quickly isolate the error log, find the root cause, and deploy a fix.
4. Communicate: Throughout the process, the linked Status Page is updated to keep users informed, building trust even during an outage.

Why Do Teams Choose Better Stack?

• Simplicity and DX: The user interface is clean, modern, and intuitive. The “SQL for logs” feature makes it instantly familiar to developers.
• Cost-Effectiveness: It is often significantly more affordable than its large enterprise competitors, with a generous free tier that is perfect for solo developers and startups.
• Unified Platform: Having logging, monitoring, and incident management in one place with one bill simplifies a team’s toolchain significantly.
• Performance: The speed of the log search is a major selling point for teams who need to debug issues quickly under pressure.

In short, Better Stack provides a beautifully designed, all-in-one observability platform that helps development teams build and operate more reliable software without the complexity and cost of traditional enterprise monitoring tools.