The State of Log Management 2025

Logs are exploding. Costs are climbing. Performance is stalling.

If you manage logs, you’re in the hot seat

Every app, every integration, every security risk—it all generates more data. And when something breaks, everyone turns to you for answers. Fast.

You’re expected to keep it all searchable, all the time—and do it within tight budgets, under mounting pressure, and with performance expectations that never let up.

Gartner is sounding the alarm

According to Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, organizations are investing more than ever—yet the same themes keep surfacing: spiraling complexity, rising costs, and the difficulty of scaling observability across modern environments. 

It’s validation of what log admins have been saying for years (Network World).

So we dug deeper

Analyst reports tell one side of the story. We wanted to hear the other side—from the people who live this every day.

That’s why we partnered with UserEvidence to survey 132 observability and platform admins. Their answers were candid, raw, and strikingly consistent:

• “If we burst past our Splunk limits, we find we’re dropping events, plus we have to reach out and purchase a higher tier of licensing. We’re hemorrhaging money trying to keep these events and logs.” — Head of IT – Telecommunications Equipment Company

• “Most of the time when we’re going back into logs, it’s because of a problem. And in that moment, trying to pull from cold storage is just painful. We’ve had times where we really needed access, but the process was so slow and manual, it made the whole situation worse.” — Jon Scarpa, Director of Information Technology at RD Abbott

• “I’ve got Splunk in one place, Graylog in another, Loki in a third. Trying to unify all of that? It’s like herding cats.” — Krishnan Chandresekharen, Associate Director, IT Architect, IQVIA

And the numbers tell the same story.

These aren’t edge cases—they’re the daily reality of running log management today.

The retention reality

Storage pressure is forcing hard choices..

Over three-quarters of respondents keep data in hot storage for less than 90 days—and half keep it for just 30.

Once it cools, 60% store data in warm tiers for only one to six months, and 58% archive or delete logs from cold storage within six months.

That means most teams lose access to the very data they need for trending, forensics, or machine learning before it can drive insight.

Why it matters now

AI and ML aren’t easing the load—they’re raising the bar. 

74% of organizations are already using or piloting AI/ML-based detection, and another 24% plan to do so in the next year. These workloads demand more data, longer retention, and faster queries.

Yet today’s trade-offs—short retention windows, filtered logs, cold-storage delays—undermine AI effectiveness before it even starts.

As one IT director put it, many teams are “monitoring but not really measuring”—flying a little blind when historical data isn’t readily available.

Imply Lumi: Built to End the Trade-Offs

Your job doesn’t need to get harder. It needs the architecture to catch up.

That’s why we introduced Imply Lumi, the industry’s first Observability Warehouse. Lumi was designed for the exact problems highlighted in this report (you can read more about the vision behind Lumi in our introduction blog).

• Scale without runaway costs
• Keep data hot longer—no painful rehydration
• Run sub-second queries—even at petabyte scale
• Work seamlessly with your existing tools like Splunk, Grafana, and Tableau

Early feedback from admins has been clear: they want a system that can handle heavy workloads, improve performance, and help reduce the trade-offs of managing hot and cold data. That’s exactly what Lumi was designed to do.

Read the full report

You’re in one of the most demanding roles in tech—and you’re not alone.

Download the full report: The State of Log Management 2025 to hear directly from your peers, and to see why a new approach to log management is long overdue.