An organization’s logging platform is a critical infrastructure component. Its purpose is to provide comprehensive and relevant information about the system, to specific parties, while it's running or when it's being built. For example, developers would require detailed and accurate logs when building and implementing services locally or in remote environments so that they can test new features.
Developing scalable and reliable applications is a serious business. It requires precision, accuracy, effective teamwork, and convenient tooling. During the software construction phase, developers employ numerous techniques to debug and resolve issues within their programs. One of these techniques is to leverage monitoring and logging libraries to discover how the application behaves in edge cases or under load.
In 1946, a moth found its way to a relay of the Mark II computer in the Computation Laboratory where Grace Hopper was employed. Since that time, software engineers and operations specialists have been plagued by “bugs.” In the age of DevOps, we can catch many bugs before they escape into a production environment. Still, occasionally they do, and they can spawn all kinds of unexpected problems when they do.
There are multiple phases in the software development process that need to be completed before the software can be released into production. Those phases, which are typically iterative, are part of what we call the software development life cycle, or SDLC. During this cycle, developers and software analysts also aim to satisfy nonfunctional requirements like reliability, maintainability, and performance.
LogDNA Alerts are an important vehicle for relaying critical real-time pieces of log data within developer and SRE workflows. From Slack to PagerDuty, these Alert integrations help users understand if something unexpected is happening or simply if their logs need attention. This allows for shorter MTTD (mean time to detection) and improved productivity.
LogDNA Alerts are a key feature for developers and SREs to stay on top of their systems and applications, as it notifies them of important changes in their log data. However, with so many different workflows to account for, it was important to enable a flexible solution that could connect to any team’s toolkit.
Modern web applications are more reliant on the frontend than ever before. While there are many benefits to this approach, one downside is that developers can lose visibility into issues when things go wrong. When the application experience is degraded, engineers are left waiting for users to report issues and share browser logs. Otherwise, they might be left in the dark and unaware that any issues exist in the first place.
