I'm pretty late to this party, but I've been using rsyslog and "EK" (skip the L - it's way too slow and resource hungry).

rsyslog / syslog-ng handles shipping logs to a central server and it's dead simple to keep local logs and a central log at the same time. Every language can spit logs to syslog vey quickly. And then you can use plugins to inject your life from rsyslog directly into elastisearch, which is incredibly fast.

Other critiques about ES still apply especially when it comes to managing conflicting keys in structured logs, but most complaints about fragility and scaling are because of Logstash, which I agree, is Terrible for logging.

I've written this up in detail if anyone is interested.