It’s virtually impossible to manage today’s complex IT environments at scale without a comprehensive system monitoring solution that allows you to check the health of all your applications and services from a single pane of glass. When your end users are experiencing difficulties, you must have such a tool in place that lets you quickly ascertain and remediate the root cause of the slowdown or error.

Whether you capture them for application security and compliance, production monitoring, performance monitoring, or troubleshooting, logs contain valuable information about the health of your apps. But it all comes down to what and how you log, which is where log management tools come into play.

“Solr or Elasticsearch?”…well, at least that is the common question we hear from Sematext’s consulting services clients and prospects. Which one is better, Solr or Elasticsearch? Which one is faster? Which one scales better? Which one is easier to manage? Which one should we use? Is there any advantage to migrating from Solr to Elasticsearch? – and the list goes on.

There are a lot of reasons why people choose to shop at one online store over another or pick one streaming service over another from the type of service they are getting to pricing, quality and, you’ve guessed it from the title, speed. The speed to which I’m referring is the speed at which the website loads and reacts to user input. In one of my previous articles about netwok latency, I’ve talked about how big of a difference even a two-second extra delay makes.