Log Management From Logit.io

Logs are files containing messages that any tool used to power your infrastructure thinks are important to track. This can include data related to performance, security, errors, users, transactions and additionally a range of competitive log data related to business analytics.

These files can present themselves as a range of different file formats (including .txt and .log). A large amount of this data isn’t human-readable and requires external processing outside of your system for parsing, filtering and prioritising.

Some services create tens of variations of distinct log files, so you can imagine that when hundreds of services might power a business’s website, production, and dev environments that these logs can multiply uncontrollably when a simple error is encountered.

Additionally, many other roles find logging vital including business analysts, product managers and marketing and sales for improving their data analysis performance.

Because log messages can come from a variety of different sources and present themselves in a wide range of formats, a log management system needs to be equipped to universally process logs from servers, programming languages, platforms, operating systems and cloud services.

Many of these systems use hosted Logstash (including Logit) to parse logs for further processing. Logstash assists in shipping, enriching and processing so that the end-user can use the data for troubleshooting and reporting within a visual dashboard.

The majority of log file viewers require installation on individual servers across distributed infrastructure by trained in-house staff. The functionality of these services is often limited and has little cross over capacity for use across infrastructure, container, and hybrid cloud monitoring.

Logit makes use of the open-source log management capabilities offered by Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Beats (also known as the ELK Stack), in order to save your technicians from having to trail errors across distributed servers and environments.

While ELK by itself is free to use initially, when it comes to configuring and upgrading the software and viewing logs for larger-scale operations it can be highly difficult to maintain inline with an organisation’s growing data complexities.

This is why using Logit’s hosted ELK platform gives you the best of both worlds as an enterprise-ready log management tool. We also offer seamless upgrades for ELK that you wouldn’t benefit from when building your own Elastic Stack deployment.