What Are Logs?
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.