Which data sources do DevOps teams need in order to achieve observability? At a high level, that’s an easy question to answer. Concepts like the “three pillars of observability”—logs, metrics, and traces—may come to mind. Or, you may think in terms of techniques like the RED Method or Google’s Golden Signals, which are other popular frameworks for defining which types of data teams should collect for monitoring and observability purposes.

As LogDNA has grown, many of our customers have too, meaning that they are bringing in more ingestion data sources and expanding their use cases for their logs. To help with managing more data, we’re excited to introduce the Control API suite. We’ve built 4 individual APIs that will help companies programmatically configure their data and how they want to ingest logs. Below, we’ll cover each new API in detail as well as why they are massively impactful for our customers.‍

The massive proliferation of log data forces teams to manage the costs to process, route, and store it. Teams need access to this data to gain critical insights into their services, but for many organizations this presents a challenge for their budget. Logging can get expensive, fast, which often results in teams making difficult tradeoffs between aggregating enough logging information to be useful and controlling the cost of storing all those logs.

Enterprises often have several servers, firewalls, databases, mobile devices, API endpoints, and other infrastructure that powers their IT. Because of this, organizations must provide resources to manage logged events across the environment. Logging is a factor in detecting and blocking cyber-attacks, and organizations use log data for auditing during an investigation after an incident. Brokers, such as Apache Kafka, will ingest logging data in real-time, process, store, and route data.

We’re honored to be included in Enterprise Management Associates’ EMA Top 3 Award for Observability Platforms. This award recognizes software products that help enterprises reach their digital transformation goals by optimizing product quality, time to market, cost, and ability to innovate—all the things we’re passionate about at LogDNA.

Observability data, and especially log data, is immensely valuable for modern business. Making the right decision—from monitoring the bits and bytes of application code to the actions in the security incident response center—requires the right people to generate insights from data as fast as possible.

Rails is a classic on Ruby for a reason. The framework is powerful, intuitive and the language has a low entry bar. However, being designed when systems existed on a single server, standard Rails logging is excessively fractionalized. Even on a single server, a straightforward call can quickly turn into seven unique, unconnected logs.

LogDNA integrates with your PagerDuty instance to help trigger incidents based on log data coming in from your ingestion sources. This allows your teams to quickly understand when there are issues with your application, and where in the logs you can investigate to understand root cause. To help further accelerate your team’s ability to understand the state of your applications, we are introducing the ability to automatically resolve those PagerDuty Incidents directly from LogDNA.

Developers of any skill set find it frustrating when we don’t have access to the information we need. We want easy and complete access to application logs so that we can troubleshoot application problems. Quickly resolving issues requires a complete picture of what’s going on. Using the wrong tools limits our ability to determine what’s wrong, slowing the repair process.

Generating and collecting logs is one thing. Generating and collecting actionable logs can be quite another. That's a problem because logs that are not actionable – meaning they can be easily used to derive valuable insights or resolve issues – are not very valuable. If you don't generate actionable logs, you might as well not log at all. Fortunately, ensuring that you generate useful logs is not tricky. Keep reading for seven tips on making your logs actionable and valuable.