If you’re going to wow your business partner, make a visiting venture capitalist’s jaw drop, or knock the socks off of a few stockholders, you could always accomplish that with something that has a lot of flash, and not much more than that, or you could show them something that has real and lasting substance, and will make a difference in your company’s bottom line. We’ve all seen business presentations filled with flashy fireworks, and we’ve all seen how quickly those fireworks fade away.
Around here, though, we believe in delivering value—the kind that stays with your organization, and gives it a solid foundation for growth. So, while the logging moves that we’re going to show you do look good, the important thing to keep in mind is that they provide genuine, substantial value—and discerning business partners and investors (the kind that you want to have in your corner) will recognize this value quickly.
Why Is Log Monitoring Useful?
What value should logs provide? Is it enough just to accumulate information so that IT staff can pick through it as required? That’s what most logs do, varying mostly in the amount of information and the level of detail. And most logs, taken as raw data, are very difficult to read and interpret; the most noticeable result of working with raw log data, in fact, is the demand that it puts on IT staff time.
5 Log Monitoring Steps to Success
Most of the value in logs is delivered by means of systems for organizing, managing, filtering, analyzing, and presenting log data. And needless to say, the best, most impressive, most valuable logging moves are those which are made possible by first-rate log management. They include:
- Quick, on-the-spot, easy-to-understand analytics. Pulling up instant, high-quality analytics may be the most impressive move that you can make when it comes to logging, and it is definitely one of the most valuable features that you should look for in any log management system. Raw log data is a gold mine, but you need to know how to extract and refine the gold. A high-quality analytics system will extract the data that’s valuable to you, based on your needs and interests, and present it in ways that make sense. It will also allow you to quickly recognize and understand the information that you’re looking for.
- Monitoring real-time data. While analysis of cumulative log data is extremely useful, there are also plenty of situations where you need to see what is going on right at the moment. Many of the processes that you most need to monitor (including customer interaction, system load, resource use, and hostile intrusion/attack) are rapid and transient, and there is no substitute for a real-time view into such events. Real-time monitoring should be accompanied by the capacity for real-time analytics. You need to be able to both see and understand events as they happen.
- Fully integrated logging and analytics. There may be processes in software development and operations which have a natural tendency to produce integrated output, but logging isn’t one of them. Each service or application can produce its own log, in its own format, based on its own standards, without reference to the content or format of the logs created by any other process. One of the most important and basic functions that any log management system can perform is log integration, bringing together not just standard log files, but also event-driven and real-time data. Want to really impress partners and investors? Bring up log data that comes from every part of your operation, and that is fully integrated into useful, easily-understood output.
- Drill-down to key data. Statistics and aggregate data are important; they give you an overall picture of how the system is operating, along with general, system-level warnings of potential trouble. But the ability to drill down to more specific levels of data—geographic regions, servers, individual accounts, specific services and processes —is what allows you to make use of much of that system-wide data. It’s one thing to see that your servers are experiencing an unusually high level of activity, and quite another to drill down and see an unusual spike in transactions centered around a group of servers in a region known for high levels of online credit card fraud. Needless to say, integrated logging and scalability are essential when it comes to drill-down capability.
- Logging throughout the application lifecycle. Logging integration includes integration across time, as well as across platforms. This means combining development, testing, and deployment logs with metrics and other performance-related data to provide a clear, unified, in-depth picture of the application’s entire lifecycle. This in turn makes it possible to look at development, operational, and performance-related issues in context, and see relationships which might not be visible without such cross-system, full lifecycle integration.
Use Log Monitoring to Go for the Gold
So there you have it—five genuine, knock-’em-dead logging moves. They’ll look very impressive in a business presentation, and they’ll tell serious, knowledgeable investors that you understand and care about substance, and not just flash. More to the point, these are logging capabilities and strategies which will provide you with valuable (and often crucial) information about the development, deployment, and ongoing operation of your software.
Logs do not need to be junkpiles of unsorted, raw data. Bring first-rate management and analytics to your logs now, and turn those junk-piles into gold.
5 Log Monitoring Moves to Wow Your Business Partner is published by the Sumo Logic DevOps Community. If you’d like to learn more or contribute, visit devops.sumologic.com. Also, be sure to check out Sumo Logic Developers for free tools and code that will enable you to monitor and troubleshoot applications from code to production.
About the Author
Michael Churchman started as a scriptwriter, editor, and producer during the anything-goes early years of the game industry. He spent much of the ‘90s in the high-pressure bundled software industry, where the move from waterfall to faster release was well under way, and near-continuous release cycles and automated deployment were already de facto standards. During that time he developed a semi-automated system for managing localization in over fifteen languages. For the past ten years, he has been involved in the analysis of software development processes and related engineering management issues.
