🎯 Logtide's Vision: Privacy-First Observability, Not Just Another Log Tool

[Polliog]

Logtide's Vision: Privacy, sanity, and killing complexity

TL;DR: We’re done trying to build "just another open-source log tool." We are pivoting Logtide to be a privacy-first observability platform. We are streamlining dependencies (making Redis optional), focusing on detection over storage, and prioritizing the 90% of you who self-host.

The Hard Truth

Logging is a commodity. Frankly, if you just want to grep text, standard open-source tools are fine, provided you have a dedicated DevOps engineer to maintain them.

We realized that if we just build a simpler version of existing tools, we will fail. Most tools fall into two traps:

1. SaaS Trap: Great UX, but pricing scales aggressively.
2. OSS Trap: Free software, but you pay with your sanity trying to manage complex clusters, ingesters, and compactors.

Logtide is for the middle ground: Startups, EU companies strictly bound by GDPR, and teams who want observability without needing a PhD in distributed systems.

The New Direction: Signals > Storage

We are restructuring our immediate roadmap around three core pillars: simplification, instant detection, and privacy. Here is what is actually being built right now.

Phase 1: Simplification & Core Detection (Current Focus)

Targeting the "Boring Tech" philosophy: easier to host, faster to debug.

• Making Redis Optional: To run Logtide today, you strictly need Redis. For many self-hosters, that's just extra operational overhead. We are moving background jobs to Postgres to enable a "Single Container, Single Volume" architecture by default. Redis remains fully supported for high-volume deployments, but it will no longer be a hard requirement.
• Opinionated Detection Packs: You shouldn't have to configure alerts from scratch. We are shipping default packs for Startup Reliability (5xx errors), Auth & Security (login failures), and Database Health. You install, and it starts detecting immediately.
• Event Correlation by ID: Distributed tracing is hard to set up. We are making it simple: if Logtide detects a request_id, trace_id, or user_id, it becomes a clickable link. Click it, and you see the full timeline across all logs. No agents required.
• Alert Preview & "Would Have Fired" Analysis: Stop guessing threshold numbers. Before you save an alert, we will show you exactly how many times it would have triggered in the last 24 hours.

Phase 2: Privacy & Intelligence (Next Up)

Focusing on data sovereignty and reducing alert fatigue.

• PII Masking at Ingestion: We are building rules to scrub sensitive data (credit cards, emails) before they hit the disk. This is non-negotiable for GDPR compliance.
• Rate-Of-Change Alerts: Static thresholds are dumb. We are introducing baseline detection to alert you when errors spike relative to normal traffic, not just when they hit a hard number.

Phase 3: Compliance & Advanced Context (Future)

Features for regulated environments.

• Audit Log of Log Access: A "Meta-log" that tracks who searched for what and when. Essential for security compliance (SOC2/ISO).
• Service Dependency Graph: Automatically mapping how your services interact based on log correlation.
• OTLP Metrics Ingestion: Expanding beyond logs to become a true observability destination.

What We Are NOT Doing

Clarity is about saying no.

• No "Generative AI for Logs": We prefer deterministic math over black-box LLMs for production errors.
• No Complex Dependencies: No heavy message brokers or complex JVM setups.
• No Enterprise Feature Creep: We aren't building SAML or SIEM features for Fortune 500s yet. We focus on the SMB/Mid-market.

A Request for Comment

This vision is risky because it ignores the "AI hype cycle" and focuses on boring stability. We need to know if we're right.

Tell us:

1. Is making Redis optional the right move? Do you prefer the simplicity of one container or do you always run Redis anyway?
2. Which detection pack would save you the most time today?

Drop a comment below. If you're running Logtide in prod, reach out—we’d love to send you some swag.

— The Logtide Team