Applications running in production, test, and development environments produce massive files filled with endless lines of text in the form of log files. Mining the data available in these files manually is a daunting, nearly impossible, effort. This is where log management tools come into play. The two most popular are Splunk and the Elastic Stack. Both solutions are excellent options, with each having their own pros and cons; this article makes no claims as to which tool is best for your organization, as there are simply too many variables to be taken into consideration to make a blanket statement of one being better than the other.