title: BigQuery vs Elasticsearch for analysing and storing application logs
body: <p>I'm investigating the merits of using BigQuery for gaining insights into application logfiles. The logs are produced by Java and C# applications, most of them on cloud-based VMs. I'm interested to hear whether others have done this and of the relative merits of BigQuery vs ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana. </p>
  
  <p>The advantage of BigQuery seems to be that it can deal with huge amounts of data whereas the ELK solutions seems maybe better suited to the non-structured nature of logfiles, especially when they come from different systems.</p>
  
  <p>I'd also like to display information on a dashboard. Kibana seems to be very good for that. How easy is it to create dashboards using the Google solution (using google sheets, etc)?</p>
  
  <p>Thoughts, use-cases?</p>