Magic Quadrant reports are the go-to source for comparing different vendors across various vital domains in the IT industry.

Unfortunately, there's one crucial domain that the Magic Quadrant doesn't currently cover- log management. Although Gartner does provide reports on proximate niches, it doesn't directly analyze or compare log management platforms.

Here's what Gartner – and its customers and readers – stand to gain by creating a Magic Quadrant dedicated to log management.

What Is Log Management?

Before discussing why Gartner should analyze the log management ecosystem in more detail, let's first clarify what log management means.

Log management is the process that organizations use to collect, process, analyze, store and rotate logs. Since virtually every IT service or application that businesses use today creates logs, almost every company has to perform log management to at least some extent. Just as every business today is a software business, every business is also in the log management business.

What Gartner Covers

Gartner currently has no Magic Quadrant report dedicated to log management specifically.

It does, however, provide Magic Quadrants for a couple of domains that relate to log management. They include:

• Security Information and Event Management, or SIEM, is a discipline that relies in part on logs to help organizations detect and manage security issues – although SIEM is about much more than managing logs.
• Application Performance Monitoring, or APM, is where logs serve alongside other data sources to provide insights into application performance.

Thus, Gartner analysts evaluate log management tools and strategies, but only within specific, narrowly focused niches.

Log Management Beyond SIEM and APM

Unfortunately, assessing log management in the context of SIEM and APM doesn't provide instrumental insight into the state of log management as a whole.

The main reason for this lack of insight is that only some businesses perform log management as part of SIEM or APM efforts. Many companies need log management tools or platforms even if they don't run a SIEM or have applications to manage.

Even among businesses that use SIEM and APM tools, there is a need to manage logs beyond these contexts. For example, a company might need to manage logs from its cloud infrastructure, which is a separate affair from SIEM and APM.

Businesses need to compare and assess log management tools for log management's own sake, not just as part of APM and SIEM.

Beating the Competition

Although Gartner does not currently cover the log management space in its own right, other groups of analysts are devoting attention to this niche.

TrustRadius maintains a list of top log management tools. So do Comparitech and G2. Even Software Testing Help, a website that focuses on software testing rather than log management, has a top-ranking page that compares log management software.

Unfortunately, while sites like these may help gain some sense of which log management tools are out there, they lack Gartner's depth and expertise in its Magic Quadrant reports. Many other sites rely on crowdsourced data or user reviews to compare log management tools, an approach that is less thorough – and more prone to bias and gaming of the system – than is Gartner's expert-led, systematic comparison of software tools.

In this sense, Gartner has a significant opportunity to increase its reader base by creating a Magic Quadrant for log management. The interest among buyers in comparing log management tools is there; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many websites that compare log management platforms. But given the lack of depth within existing comparisons, Gartner stands to draw readers away from third-party sites if it were to create log management tool comparisons of its own.

It would also, of course, be doing a significant service to the tech community, which needs more expert-level analysis of how log management tools compare.

Conclusion

In short, there is apparent demand for comparisons of log management software. To date, websites with a lower level of authority than Gartner analysts are trying to meet it. And although Gartner provides analysis of SIEM and APM, those domains are too distinct from log management to offer the types of insight that the IT community is looking for within the log management space specifically.

Gartner can bring expert-level insight to this vital niche by establishing a Magic Quadrant for log management. In so doing, Gartner will attract more readers to its reports while also helping buyers make more informed choices about the various log management tools on the market today.