Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might remember the scene where Indy and his dad are in a room replete with the most ornate chalices possible, only to realize that the Holy Grail is the most plain, utilitarian one in the room. Windows event logs are the IT version of the plain-looking clay cup that holds the key to answering your service questions and system issues.

Increasingly, the speed and scale of a business can be measured by the resilience and performance of its applications. That’s why organizations are opting to modernize legacy applications by rewriting them using cloud-native tools and platforms. A Gartner study found that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will be the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, compared to less than 40% in 2021.

This article is the third of a four-part series of articles about Elasticsearch monitoring. In the first article, we put together an Elasticsearch guide, covering how Elasticsearch works and why the setup and tuning of Elasticsearch requires a good knowledge of configuration options and performance metrics.

Observability has become one of the most important areas of your application and infrastructure landscape, and the market has an abundance of tools available that seem to do what you need. In reality, however, most products - especially leading open source tools - were created to solve a single problem extremely well, and have added additional supporting functionality to become a more robust solution; but the non-core functionality is rarely best of breed. Examples of these are Prometheus and Grafana.