Logs can be a vital connection between Dev and Ops, offering insights related to troubleshooting and identifying complex root causes. But logs can be challenging to manage, as they can evaporate after you destroy a container or could be difficult to access in distributed architectures.
Figuring out the logs can distract the development team from their primary goal, developing and deploying apps. LaaS is a technology that can make things easier for developers by offering access, aggregation, and alerts.
Understanding Logs
Before you deconstruct your container or microservice, cloud-native services working continuously to deliver production bliss, you have to create something first. Or if you decide to go with an on-premise approach, before you decide that any application is ready, you’d need familiarization, configuration, and testing. In any case, during the testing phase, logs are the go-to option.
How many times did you manage to come close to a breakthrough and then lost spark during re-implementation of a fundamental component? Picking up a log exporter, figuring out the essential files, transfer them over the network, and test. Now that sounds a lot of work. Or imagine a scenario where you are collecting request error from MySQL, or need Windows Security events in someplace other than the local. Having multiple console window can be an option, but not an efficient one.
Imagine if logging was a service. What if the sysadmins or developers or the network team could focus on their work rather than prerequisites? With LaaS, you can standardize the collection, persistence, and event analysis for quick delivery. It is also a viable option for troubleshooting issues.
Access
Logs on the server are accessible, but finding them inside of something on a server is trickier. For packaged apps, there are tools available and recommended by the vendors, which ends up on the invoice and cause inefficient cross-team tool expertise.
With the help of logging export services or VMARE Virtualization OS agent automation, you can eliminate the need for checking the running instances. Autonomous processes can help publish events, warts, and everything else, making it easy to preserve, observe, search, and take actions.
While being a crucial key for IoT, logs can be difficult to access. Tiny CPU/OS/applications keep their data in a tiny storage. The data is kept on the server, away from the world. But just because they are small and cheap, doesn’t mean that their info is useless. Logs are precious for debugging and could be transported discretely through LaaS.
Aggregation
Large enterprises are using a centralized logging aggregator while handling proof-of-concept services, managing aggregation technologies, and other aspects can be challenging for individual developers.
If the logging is simplified into a single stack pile, aggregation comes naturally, reducing the complexity for everyone.
Useful Alerts
LaaS platforms can collect the verbose while alerting the authorities. Most of the times, the collected logs are set too high to highlight bedevilling and operational errors. The only solution is to increase details while staying on alert when local filesystems fill with unrequired debug events.
LaaS platforms can send all the details while staying alert at all times. They offer optimized tools to remove repetitive work with in-memory analysis, normalization, and saved searches. LaaS engine runs continuously to provide real-time alerts across all the systems. User can use the data and decide what is and isn’t meaningful. Op teams can send failure messages to their devices, while developers can send log lines from test to analyze. It delivers details on demand, without spamming you with alerts.
A Fun Ride
If you haven’t experimented with the LaaS, we suggest you to. Once you start using it, you will understand that centralized logging can let you focus on more important things. Creating a one-time SNS exporter, configuring Winston for Node, or getting system journalctl events more quickly than you think. Moreover, it improves quality and shortens release time.