We’ve all been there. That harrowing moment at the restaurant when the waiter comes to the table and asks that fateful question: “Are you ready to order?” I don’t know about you, but I am almost never ready. Do I want chicken or steak? I’ve eaten a lot of meat this week… Should I opt for fish or a vegetarian option instead? Oh, God. I forgot to check the reviews online. What do other people like the best? Cue heart palpitations.

Performance is a vital component of user experience. Users will leave—and likely not come back—if your site is slow. If they stay, they’ll be less likely to buy from you if their experience is subpar. To add insult to injury, they’re even less likely to find your app to begin with, since Google punishes poorly-performing sites in the search results. To solve the problem of poor performance, knowledge of what impacts performance is essential.

LogDNA is experiencing explosive growth in response to our work to harness observability data across a broad set of enterprise use cases. Today, this tremendous opportunity is validated by our announcement of a $50 million series D led by NightDragon, the cybersecurity investment and advisory firm.

A new version of Loki was released back in November, and I’m here to talk about one of its most exciting features. Loki 2.4 finally removed the requirement that all data must be ingested in timestamp-ascending order. Instead, Loki now allows out of order logs up to a configurable validity window (more to come on that). In this post, I’ll walk through what all this means and why we’re thrilled about it.

If you think log files are only necessary for satisfying audit and compliance requirements, or to help software engineers debug issues during development, you’re certainly not alone. Although log files may not sound like the most engaging or valuable assets, for many organizations, they are an untapped reservoir of insights that can offer significant benefits to your business.