# Logging Alternatives

**URL:** <https://community.fly.io/t/logging-alternatives/4525>\
**Category:** Questions / Help\
**Tags:** logs\
**Created:** [March 28, 2022, 10:52pm UTC](https://community.fly.io/t/logging-alternatives/4525 "2022-03-28T22:52:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Miserlou](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/fly1/user_avatar/community.fly.io/miserlou/32/10944_2.png) [@Miserlou](https://community.fly.io/u/Miserlou)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2022, 10:52pm UTC](https://community.fly.io/t/logging-alternatives/4525/1 "2022-03-28T22:52:13Z")

</div>

I find the out-of-the-box [Fly.io](http://Fly.io) logging very unsatisfactory.

Today I have encountered:

```auto
fly logs
Error failed retrieving app whatmyappiscalled: server returned a non-200 status code: 503

```

and

```auto
fly logs
Error 422 Unprocessable Entity

```

and many attempts where the command simply hangs forever, either from the shell or the web UI.

So, I was wondering what people here are using as an alternative.

I see that the `fly-log-shipper` project has support for lots of paid platforms, but I was wondering if anybody else in the community had come up with another solution. I’d like to use `fly-log-shipper` on something that I could deploy as a Dockerfile to Fly itself, perhaps Sentry, but ideally something very very lightweight.

Does anybody have any suggestions or experiences they can share?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kurt](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/fly1/user_avatar/community.fly.io/kurt/32/43757_2.png) [@kurt](https://community.fly.io/u/kurt)\
**Post date:** [March 29, 2022, 12:03am UTC](https://community.fly.io/t/logging-alternatives/4525/2 "2022-03-29T00:03:38Z")

</div>

Logs services are miserably complicated. The `422` you got was because we had to temporarily disable log querying due to an API outage this morning, for example. They should be working better now (we just re-enabled the logs endpoint).

LogDNA does free log tailing if that’s most what you need.

The simplest ready to go log setup is Loki and it’s still two components + s3: [GitHub - grafana/loki: Like Prometheus, but for logs.](https://github.com/grafana/loki)

If I were trying to do simple logs, I might consider just subscribing to NATs and writing stuff to sqlite files with the full text extension: [SQLite FTS5 Extension](https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html)

NATs has clients for most runtimes, and you can just connect directly to our NATS service if you want: [Fly Logs over NATS](https://community.fly.io/t/fly-logs-over-nats/1540)