Both Logstash and elasticsearch are great - but they both suffer from the same flaw: they're a pain to deploy and it's a pain to manage their packages.
With logstash, I aim to make it as easy to deploy as possible. That is, in part, why the releases are self-contained jar files with all depenencies built-in (except for java itself). We also started working on shipping rpm/deb packages with recent releases.
Like I always say, if it's hard to use or appears to have major flaws or pains, it's a bug, and we can fix it. Let us know! :)
If you're crazy like me and run elasticsearch on Windows, I can't recommend elasticsearch-setup [1] highly enough. Combined with node discovery via the EC2 API [2], it's been rock-solid.
