DevOps: Are you centralizing your log files?

System configurations are becoming more complex all the time. Each and every server, container, and key application and service today has log files that tell you a wealth about what’s going on under the covers. But how accessible are those log files in your organization?

If you aren’t using a log management tool, you probably should be.

Here are a few easy ones to get started with:

Azure Monitor

One thing that I do find frustrating with Microsoft tooling at present is the constant churn of product names. A while back, we had Application Insights that could collect details of what was happening within an app. The data for that was stored in a tool called Log Analytics, and it could also collect operating system logs and more. Agents were provided for on-premises systems.

Originally, these tools had different query languages but eventually, the query language for Log Analytics was one that’s used. It’s awesome to be able to write a query to simply find and filter log details.

For my SQL Server buddies, there were SQL Insights which has now morphed into SQL Server Intelligent Insights along with Azure SQL Database Intelligent Insights. These allow you to capture bunches of info about your SQL Server instances and databases so very simply.

I constantly visit client sites where they have purchased tools for this, and those tools aren’t even close to being as useful as these Azure ones. And they don’t just work with Microsoft servers and services.

Anyway, these have now all been bundled up again under the name Azure Monitor.

Azure Monitor also offers built-in integration with popular DevOps, issue management, ITSM and SIEM tools. You can use packaged solutions for monitoring specialised workloads, or build your own custom integration using Azure Monitor REST APIs and webhooks.

Papertrail

Another interesting offering from our friends at SolarWinds, is Papertrail. Their claim is “Frustration-free log management. Get started in seconds. Instantly manage logs from 2 servers… or 2,000”. Papertrail seems to be gaining a stronghold in the Linux, MySQL, Ruby, Apache, Tomcat areas along with many others.

In the end, if you aren’t using one of these types of tools, you probably should be.

2018-12-20