With Docker there was not supposed to be a need to store logs in files. We should output information to stdout/stderr and the rest will be taken care by Docker itself. When we need to inspect logs all we are supposed to do is run docker logs [CONTAINER_NAME].

With Docker and ever more popular usage of micro services, number of deployed containers is increasing rapidly. Monitoring logs for each container separately quickly becomes a nightmare. Monitoring few or even ten containers individually is not hard. When that number starts moving towards tens or hundreds, individual logging is unpractical at best. If we add distributed services the situation gets even worst. Not only that we have many containers but they are distributed across many servers.

The solution is to use some kind of centralized logging. Our favourite combination is ELK stack (ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana). However, centralized logging with Docker on large-scale was not a trivial thing to do (until version 1.6 was released). We had a couple of solutions but none of them seemed good enough.
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