What is log management?
Business environments are growing increasingly complex with the hybrid workforce, hybrid storage, and complicated networks that aid in digital transformation. Troubleshooting one small issue involves analyzing data from multiple sources to understand what has gone wrong and the impact it has created. Log management is the process of collecting and managing logs from the servers, applications, and network devices that run IT in a business environment. With the ultimate goal of troubleshooting and analysis, cloud log management involves managing all your logs from a centralized solution hosted in the cloud.
Why is log management important?
Quickly identifying and rectifying issues is critical to improve application performance. You can achieve this by analyzing logs from different servers and applications using a log management service. Log management is essential in:
- Fixing issues like external database call failure, application exceptions, file upload failure, and dynamic user input verification.
- Collecting and managing logs from multiple sources using a single interface.
- Consolidating logs based on type.
- Indexing logs for easy and intuitive search.
- Searching through a wide range of logs and filtering out the required fields for troubleshooting.
- Easily scaling up to manage a growing volume of logs.
Key features of Site24x7 cloud log management tool
Simplify log collection with Logstash and FluentD support
As the number of applications and servers grows, managing logs becomes complex. It also becomes difficult to collect logs from different environments and sources. With the support for open source log shippers like Logstash and FluentD, Site24x7 streamlines log collection and allows forwarding logs from various sources, thus provisioning distributed log management using a simple plugin.
Out of the box support for common applications
With Site24x7's centralized cloud log management, all your typical application logs (e.g., IIS, Cassandra, Apache, and NGINX) and logging frameworks (e.g., Log4j, Log4Net, and NLog) are automatically recognized. You can also define your own log pattern and save it as a custom format. Logs falling under any default or custom format will be automatically retrieved during auto-discovery. You can also pull log files from your remote servers and manage them.
Manage logs from different cloud service providers
Site24x7 log management tool automatically recognizes and manages your AWS and Azure logs. You can easily manage CloudTrail, CloudFront, CloudWatch, S3, Load Balancer logs and other AWS logs with a simple configuration. Collect and analyze logs from Azure App Service, Active Directory, Functions, Front Door, Cosmos DB, and more for a full-fledged cloud log monitoring.
Index your log data for a fast, distributed search
All incoming raw log entries are systematically sorted, documented, and named to make them easily identifiable and are showcased as a table. The default pattern of your records is noted and grouped into specific log types, helping with faster search and retrieval. You can associate the log pattern with a server or a set of servers to narrow or broaden your search field.
Derive quick, actionable insights with our easy-to-use web client
Filter, search, and analyze any incoming log data with our simple and intuitive web client that provides both numeric and text-based searches. Use conditional and aggregation queries on numeric fields and sub-string and grouping queries on string fields. You can search up to 30 days worth of logs in one go.
Monitor log errors and receive instant notifications
Managing massive volumes of log data is easy with threshold-based alerting via email, SMS, and voice call. Be it a recurring error codes, response time spikes, or application failures, you can receive instant notifications and take preventive and recovery actions. You can also configure and receive alerts based on relative time, thus leaving no significant change in your IT environment go unnoticed.
Agile log management with exclusive dashboards
Troubleshoot faster than ever with keyword-based searches and visual aids like graphs and dashboards to help you pinpoint the number of times a particular log has been indexed. Obtain an exclusive dashboard to manage your logs with multiple widgets and search options.
The benefits of log management
Log management is a consolidated approach to troubleshooting and analysis. It helps DevOps, system engineers, and sysadmins derive actionable insights to accelerate detection and solve problems. With log management, you can:
- Obtain centralized analysis for logs from different sources
- Acquire single-console monitoring
- Automate troubleshooting and alerting
- Drill down to identify the exact cause of the issue
- Save time on analysis.
Hear it from our customer
Site24x7 AppLogs is so critical for us, and we have so many different things that we need to draw that data into a single pane of glass for. Support from Site24x7 has been impeccable. I know when I submit something, I’ll receive a response. In one instance, I suggested a capability that would help us, spoke with the Site24x7 support team, they agreed, and it became a mainstream feature for all Site24x7 users two weeks later.
Challenges in log management
Like any other IT process, log management comes with its issues and challenges. To obtain real-time solutions for log management issues, data analysis should be comprehensive enough to cover even large volumes of generated logs.
The most common challenges include:
- Tracking the exact line of code to troubleshoot issues. Organizations generate a huge amount of logs that need to be filtered and properly tracked.
- Switching tabs to monitor logs from different sources. Logs have to be correlated to understand application behavior properly and trace issues.
- Identifying log issues like exceptions, timeouts, and delays and promptly alerting IT admins.
- Automating appropriate management parameters. It's important to know what to automate and when, as logs generate new issues every day.
Processes involved in log management
Log management is a collective term that involves several processes that, when combined, provide solutions to real-time problems that DevOps and IT teams face on a regular basis. Log management involves:
Log collection
This is the first step and involves collecting logs from different applications like IIS, Cassandra, and Apache and other servers, log frame works, network devices, and the cloud. Each log type captures different formats of logs and determines the amount of logs generated.
Each of these have to be properly defined for the log collector or the log management tool to collect logs properly. Collected logs can be uploaded to Site24x7 using collection agents, HTTPS endpoint APIs, or by simply uploading them manually.
Log consolidation or centralization
Log centralization, aggregation, or consolidation simply means putting together all the logs collected from different sources and visualizing them in a unified console. This single, centralized platform provides an easy-to-use interface that helps with spotting and troubleshooting performance issues quickly.
System administrators have to access logs every day to investigate server anomalies, track performance slowdowns, mitigate hacking attempts, and prevent server crashes. With Site24x7 AppLogs, you can quickly track all forms of syslog and access log issues like exceptions, timeouts, and delays with the fast search feature.
Consolidating all this information in one place to get contextual correlation between your logs and server data gives you immediate, actionable insights, all from the cloud. You can even save searches for future use.
Log indexing
Logs always come big. This is why it's important to split logs into multiple tokens and store them into indexes, so that they can be queried and searched faster. This involves separating logs by type so that it's easy to identify similar logs. With Site24x7's ability to auto-discover log formats for more than twenty application-related logs, logs are indexed quickly from across servers.
Log storage
Storing critical logs for a long duration is essential for auditing. Retaining logs is easy when you use cloud-based log monitoring tools and cheaper than storing logs on-premises. On top of that, retrieving logs is also easier when they're stored in the cloud.
Log analysis
Log analysis, the most important part of log management, involves analyzing every event and every single line of code to debug issues and anomalies and identifying the root cause of performance degradation. It also includes searching different logs, filtering out the required ones, and viewing the filtered and analyzed data using intuitive dashboards and reports.
Site24x7's single, intuitive web interface helps operation teams get contextual correlation along with your server data for quick actionable insights.
How does our cloud log management system work?
- Our log management service comes bundled with Site24x7's Server Monitoring agent. Once you've installed the agent, Site24x7 will discover and list the log types (supported by default by Site24x7) that are available in your server. Once you confirm log collection, the agent will collect your logs and push them to our storage server for full-fledged server log management.
- The agent searches through your server and detects the native log patterns of more than 70 different log types in addition to the log patterns that you define.
- You can view the data within five minutes after you've installed the agent, and you can begin searching using keywords from our web client.
- You can also receive alerts about issues through email, SMS, voice call, and instant messenger.
- If you're already using Site24x7 APM, you can choose to monitor your application and search with our intuitive UI to gain quick, actionable insights, all from a single web client.
- Configure Site24x7 to check logs, files, and directories in your server at frequent intervals.
- Get insight on subscription-level events and operational data, and determine the status of all operations that occurred in your Azure and AWS resources for a centralized cloud log management.
More with our log management tool-AppLogs
- Manage Okta event logs using our Okta plugin.
- Collect and manage events from Zoom Meetings, Video Webinars, Conference Rooms, and Chat, and analyze their availability and performance. Save searches, create alerts, schedule reports, and view key metrics on an exclusive Zoom monitoring dashboard.
Overview of log management
What is centralized log management?
Centralized log management (CLM) is a consolidated approach that allows DevOps and IT teams to analyze system, application, and security logs from one place. A CLM system collects logs from different sources and pushes them to a unified console where different logs can be compared and analyzed using a unified interface. This reduces the mean time to repair. The other benefits of CLM include storing logs in one centralized location, providing easy access for accessing remote logs, and allowing easy search across different log types.
What is the importance of log management in DevOps?
Logs are one of the pillars of observability that ensure stable operations for DevOps. With data interconnected across distributed systems, ensuring the success of deployments and operations with minimum hindrances is paramount. Log collection and full-fledged analysis allowing DevOps teams to correlate logs with performance metrics helps to optimize performance and increase productivity.
How do you manage logs?
You can manage your logs using log management tools like Site24x7. Log management tools collect your logs, analyze them, and present them as intuitive dashboards and reports, so that you can identify issues and obtain actionable insights with which you can execute corrective measures accordingly.