Splunk is a great tool for searching logs, but its high cost makes it prohibitive for many teams. In this article, we present a free and open source alternative to Splunk by combining three open source projects: ElasticSearch, Kibana, and Fluentd.
http://docs.fluentd.org/articles/free-alternative-to-splunk-by-fluentd
Thanks for the info, it’s a great alternative, but there are many more. As an example, NXLog is also a great log management solution, which offers the free & open source Community Edition (NXLog CE) that is also a great alternatice, since it’s highly scalable and offers high performance for log management. The details are available here: https://nxlog.co/products/nxlog-community-edition
there are a number of alternatives like NXLog, but the power combination of Kibana and elasticsearch as part of the ELK/EFK stack makes it a very string contender.