Logging your virtual machines (VMs) is important, but what’s even more important is logging the hypervisors that run them. Hypervisors generate extremely useful data about the operation of your virtual machines and the environments that they run in. While VMs provide some information about their state, details such as VM performance, changes in state, errors, and security can only be found through hypervisor logs.

Being inside a company that lives and breathes logging, observability and DevOps intelligence, sometimes it takes a moment to step back and explain what we do to friends, family and others. The simplest way we explain what LogDNA solves for companies with IT systems and software is similar to a blackbox on a plane that keeps a record of the flight data and the cockpit voice recorder.

SaltStack is an open source configuration management tool that lets you manage your infrastructure as code. Using SaltStack, you can manage tens of thousands of servers remotely using either a declarative language or imperative commands. It’s similar to configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

Cloud Foundry Application Runtime is an open source platform as a service (PaaS) for running applications and services. Frequently called simply “Cloud Foundry,” the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) is one of many interoperable projects within the Cloud Foundry family. For the purposes of this post, “Cloud Foundry” refers to the Application Runtime.

Alerts are a core part of monitoring systems. Using alerts keeps you aware of changes within your infrastructure and applications, helping you identify and respond to issues faster. Log management solutions like LogDNA provide an ideal environment for configuring alerts, since it allows you to create detailed alerts based on your log data. Rather than manually search for problems, you can use alerts to scan your log data in real-time and receive immediate notifications on potential problems.

One of my former teammates approached me the other day (and by other day i mean like 3 months ago) and asked ‘Am I thinking about this right? Kubernetes is actually akin to the Linux Kernel. So Rancher and OpenShift are distributions of Kubernetes. And for a supported enterprise application I’m more likely to use a more enterprise focused distribution than a DIY distribution, yeah?’ To which I responded ‘Yep, you hit the nail on the head’.

Many of our users are responsible for monitoring logs to detect sudden changes in volume or to control the budget. To help you with this goal, we’re excited to announce new enhancements to our usage dashboard.

The number of open source components in proprietary apps continues to rise—a 2018 code audit found that there were 257 open source components per proprietary application. The same audit found that 57 percent of the average proprietary application codebase was open source.

Views may seem straightforward at first, but they hide a lot of power. On a very basic level, a view is a shortcut to a specific search query or filter. You can use views to display only a subset of logs, create alerts and graphs, export specific events, and even embed your log event feed on another website. In this post, we’ll present several tips and tricks for making the most out of views.

When logging applications to a centralized location like LogDNA, developers have two options: using a logging agent or using a logging library. Both approaches will get your logs to their destination, but choosing one over the other can have a significant impact on the design of your applications and infrastructure. In this article, we’ll explain the difference between logging via agents and logging via libraries, and which approach works best in modern architectures.