Logging is vital to the success of any IT project. With solid logging practice, you can troubleshoot errors, find patterns, calculate statistics, and communicate information easily. With the size and complexity of modern systems, performing these actions involves various analysis activities. One of these important analysis activities is anomaly detection. What is anomaly detection, and where does it fit in all of this? That’s what this post is about.

Let’s start with a simple picture and a question. You are involved in the day-to-day running of a complex and hybrid cloud of IT systems and applications. These systems, technologies, applications, processes and other platforms perform a number of critical business functions.

For those out there searching for “What is syslog?,” this post has answers to all of your questions. Simply put, syslog handles a very important task—collecting events—and is present in almost all systems and peripherals out there. It’s the standard used to collect events in an ever-growing number of devices. Syslog can often be related to Ubuntu and servers, but it’s certainly much more than that.