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Unfortunately, I am assuming like most folks in this role, the title DBA came by default rather than design.

I am trying to manage our farm of 5 SQL Server 2016 servers, each having a warm stand-by for our Disaster Recovery.

We have queried our user base and have come to the decision that some downtown is acceptable as long as we can minimize data loss. We do not need point in time recoveries, only to ensure that we have the most current data possible based on the users data loss acceptability.

What we have decide for our model is each database on each of the primaries will be backed up and restored on the appropriate stand-by (with the database left in Stand-By/Read Only mode) and then a log shipping job created to ship the log to the standby server every 30 seconds to 1 hour depending on the data loss sensitivity. Then, on each stand by server, once every 15 minutes to 1 hour, a restore job runs to restore all the transactions shipped from the primary into the stand by database. Once the transactions have been shipped to the stand by and restored successfully, I no longer care about those transactions.

This works great as I can query the stand by databases and see the updated data as expected.

Where I am lacking information in is, my transaction log is growing larger than my DB file on my primary. I ASSUMED that the log shipping would mark the log as backed up, but I am apparently wrong.

I am hesitant to create a job that takes full backups as I do not want to break the log shipping chain so here is where I need some advise on how to control my log sizes.

I have queried the internet for answers, but I get about as many different answers as there are results, so I am turning here for advise.

Thanks in advance,
Keith

I am hesitant to create a job that takes full backups as I do not want to break the log shipping chain so here is where I need some advise on how to control my log sizes.

This is a misconception/myth. A fullbackup will never break the log backup chain. Only an adhoc NON COPY_ONLY backup will break the log backup chain.

In full recovery, only a full backup will truncate the log.

ran a log_reuse_wait_desc and there is nothing holding the log

Check your autogrowth settings. Make sure it is not set to Percent autogrowth and the MB autogrowth is sensible.

You can check my script to check.

Also, you should check : Why Does the Transaction Log Keep Growing or Run Out of Space?

Where I am lacking information in is, my transaction log is growing
larger than my DB file on my primary. I ASSUMED that the log shipping
would mark the log as backed up, but I am apparently wrong.

Log shipping utilises transaction log backups on the SQL Server. A T-Log backup will mark portions of the log that contain committed transactions as inactive and available for re-use after the backup is complete. If your backup frequency is up to 1 hour then your transaction log file could conceivably grow large due to the low frequency of backup and high volumes of transactions. Does it grow constantly or only at certain times (weekends, overnight etc)? Regardless of the cause, increasing the frequency of backups will likely fix this.

I am hesitant to create a job that takes full backups as I do not want
to break the log shipping chain so here is where I need some advise on
how to control my log sizes.

Full backups will not break your log chain. You should still be running regular full backups even when utilising log shipping, the key is to avoid ad-hoc log backups as these will break the log chain.

There is a question on SE and the answers provide really good information on restore chains in SQL Server. Have a read through to get a better understanding of the restore chains in SQL Server.

You also need to consider other scenarios in your DR plan besides your primary server going offline. Not taking Full backups means that if you have a user-initiated bad data event (someone drops a table, deletes a record etc accidentally), your options for recovering the correct data state will be limited by the retention of your original full backup.

What happens if that full backup file becomes corrupt?

Are you prepared to restore, potentially, months worth of log files to reinitialise log shipping if need be?

Do you retain your log backups long enough to reinitialise log shipping from the original Full backup, or will you take a fresh Full, potentially during business hours, should you need to reinitialise?

Given some of your databases have such low RPOs (30-seconds), have you considered other technology such as Availability Groups to provide much lower RPORTO without the overhead of shipping log backups?