Thanks for reaching out. It really depends on what you're looking for, and I don't want to hijack this thread with a long discussion, so feel free to reach out at https://scalyr.com/contact. If you're focused on the power of the query language, then Splunk is the undisputed leader, but we are relatively strong as well; see https://app.scalyr.com/help/power-queries. This iteration of our query language was launched last year and was a lot of fun to build -- the team allowed me to write a fair amount of the code. :-)

You can find a more general overview at https://scalyr.com/product.

Mostly looking for decent query language, decent charting, and API to grab chart data.

Seems like you guys fit the bill. I'll do the 30 day trial, and see how it goes. Thanks for the response.

I was an early Scalyr user circa 2014 or so, and have used Splunk at various gigs before and after. My current company is not a Scalyr customer and that makes me pretty sad - even back then, they were snappy and responsive in ways that Splunk has never matched. Despite (maybe due to?) being substantially cheaper, the service we received from the founders and operators was second to none; for example, I remember that someone even hand-wrote a Clojure EDN log-parser for us at no extra charge, just to make sure we were happy.

Steve says elsewhere in the thread that Splunk has the more-flexible query language, and while that may be true I as a product engineer never noticed the delta myself.

TL;DR I think you'd be doing yourself a favor to try Scalyr, and I have no affiliation other than being a happy former customer.

Thanks. This is helpful information.