Log Management and Monitoring

Log management and monitoring tools are the satellite of any business willing to create stable and efficient software or applications. Insights help to understand the infrastructure deeper and take appropriate actions in time to prevent undesired interventions or even downtimes. So what are the use cases and best practices for logging and monitoring, and, generally, IT analytics?

IT monitoring
IT monitoring tools provide a super-detailed overview on the operational processes of each application level, statuses, reports on key metrics like average response time, server usage, cloud resources usage, CPU usage, availability rate etc. These tools gather all required information and interpret it through dashboards and data charts.

For more insights, there are two general types of monitoring reports:

• real-time monitoring 
• trends monitoring and predictive analytics

In the first case, IT staff uses real-time monitoring tools to consistently access data from current environments and control ongoing status updates.

In the second case, monitoring and analytics enables historical data overview on trends and system behaviour patterns. It provides a long-standing view of IT ecosystem from any period you need.

Examples of metrics to track: requests and responses per second, responses per second by status, response time percentiles, system load, CPU consumption, active connections. What's interesting here - all metrics are the same for both types of tools and the only difference is the time when you receive data. For debugging purposes, you use real-time reports to get rid of bugs immediately, for performance analysis you use historical data to see trends and opportunities.

Log management
Logs are the text records of all events (for instance, transaction, messages etc) occurred while application operations happen and are kept in the journal. Consequently, logging is the process of log recording, log processing and management. Proper log recording is the crucial part of IT monitoring activities.

Recorded data in log management system is used for managing and troubleshooting of the applications. It helps make things clear and find out the reason for degraded performance or even failures and that's anything but just a little part of use cases.

Common use cases for logging:

• Real-time tracking of events to eliminate unforeseen issues 
• System triggers the alarms upon the specific word patterns (keywords) for instant preventive actions
• Identification of all misconfigurations and performance issues
• Root cause analysis for further infrastructure performance optimization
• Track metrics and KPIs 
• Meeting obligatory regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI, MIFiD etc

So, logs are like a treasure trove of each company, allowing to clarify the issues and - most important - prevent downtimes and serious losses.

Now you know how important it is to use these tools for IT systems enhancements and optimization. Working without log management and monitoring tools is a wild guess, just a shot in the dark - what's unacceptable in the era of tight and severe competition.