I'm pretty impressed with Splunk, especially version 4. Pretty graphs, alerting (Enterprise only), and fast, accurate, searching. It's a great product.

However, the cost just way too high to consider for full production use for our company. All we really need is to be able to index different logs in a central place, and have reasonable searching on that. Having alerts based on a saved search is also really nice. We don't really go beyond that.

In fact, our biggest usage has been in deploying new applications. Everything gets logged via log4net to either the Event log on Windows or a text file on Linux. Splunk makes it pretty easy to quickly search across those to make sure all the parts of the app are working ok -- that's saved us tons of time versus hunting down individual logging sources.

What alternatives exist in this market? I have a sinking feeling Splunk's pricing is so high because they have the best product by far, and they know it. We want the server to run on Windows.

I'd be open to a split model, using one product for general logs (collect via syslog/Snare), and a dedicated product for our custom apps (like Log4Net Dashboard).

Would using a simple syslog server such as Kiwi, sent to SQL Server (perhaps with fulltext enabled) work?

I'd hope the cost should be well under 5 figures, USD. (And yes, I know, we're cheap. We're a startup with little money, and BizSpark takes care of all our MS licensing.)

Edit: I should add, we have about 10 physical servers, 20 VMs, and a couple firewalls and switches. 90% is Windows.