Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As you’re settling in with your Monday morning coffee, your email pings. The subject line reads, “Documentation Request.” With the internal sigh that only happens on a Monday morning when compliance is about to change your entire to-do list, you remember it’s that time of the year again. You need to pull together the documentation for your external auditor as part of your annual ISO 27000 and ISO 27001 audit.

Today it is even easier to capture logs in your Java applications. Developers can get more data with their application logs using a new version of the Cloud Logging client library for Java. The library populates the current executing context implicitly with every ingested log entry. Read this if you want to learn how to get HTTP requests and tracing information and additional metadata in your logs without writing a single line of code.

Talk to anyone in the tech space and you’ll likely hear horror stories of how home lab setups can grow out of control or about long lists of VMs used to test various software systems. As a Criblanian, I’m no exception – I have at least a half dozen instances of Cribl LogStream deployed everywhere from my local machine, on docker containers, or on a few EC2 instances in AWS.

SolarWinds® Loggly® was built to cut through large volumes of noisy log data to quickly pinpoint the exact events relevant to your search. Whether your log data is structured into neat field and value pairs which lend themselves to precise search queries or written in unstructured text blobs, Loggly enables you to extract meaningful insights from your logs—even if you’re not a query master.

Log files are an important source of information about the state of an application and how it’s functioning. Therefore, log management and analysis are critical to application performance monitoring.

Log messages - also known as event logs, audit records, and audit trails – document computing events occurring in IT environments. Generated or triggered by the software or the user, log messages provide visibility into and documentation of almost every action on a system. So, with all that in mind, let’s explore all the biggest log management challenges of modern IT and the solutions for these problems.

Logs are records of system events and activities that provide valuable information used to support a wide range of administrative tasks—from analyzing application performance and debugging system errors to investigating security and compliance issues. Large-scale production environments emit enormous quantities of logs, which can make them more challenging to manage and introduces the risk of losing important data if underlying resources run out of space.

Imagine a workflow where you change and test all of your configurations in the “development” environment, committing those changes along the way, and then when you’re happy with the changes, you bundle them together in a single “pull request”, and the changes, after being reviewed by your peer(s), get pushed into production.

Before we jump into this, it’s important to note that older names, and still in use in some areas of AWS, are often referred to SSM which stands for Simple Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager is designed to be a control panel for your AWS resources so you can manage them externally without having to SSH into the resources individually. What is important to remember with AWS Systems Manager is that features contained within the tool may occur additional pricing.

It’s that time of the year again. The annual and dreaded IT and security audit is ramping up. You just received the documentation list and need to pull everything together. You have too much real work to do, but you need to prove your compliance posture to this outsider. Using log management for compliance monitoring and documentation can make audits less stressful and time-consuming.