Everything you need to know about creating a log management program Businesses create, collect and have access to more data than ever before. Some of this log data, the record of events that occur in your digital spaces, can help DevOps and security teams assess the performance and reliability of their systems, evaluate weaknesses and troubleshoot any issues that may be occurring.

As a company born in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, we understand that operating at cloud scale requires balancing security, compliance, and operational safety with your commitment to innovation, speed, and agility. From cost optimization at scale to operational resiliency to application modernization, we know you’re facing various challenges and need reliable solutions.

While many of the popular tools for observability in software are open source, one thing they lack is open design. Most of these solutions, from Nagios to Prometheus, started as a product with an opinionated design, which happened to work well for many people. These became the de facto standards. That position of de facto standard is what every open-source project and every commercial product tries to be.

Logs record digital actions within your IT system to let you know where errors or unauthorized access attempts originated. However, having only a partial log management plan — or lacking one entirely — can leave you with a mess of unstructured data that doesn’t provide the insights you need. Fortunately, following log management best practices can make tracking your digital actions or modifying your current log management plan a straightforward process.

Your Apache HTTP server access and error logs contain a wealth of actionable insights about potential server configuration and web application issues. The problem is that this information is hidden within millions of log messages, so you need analytics to efficiently extract these insights so you can respond to problems before they impact your users. Apache log analysis revolves around two activities: monitoring and troubleshooting.

DevOps teams are used to working with data that is spread out across lots of different systems and environments. In organizations that have achieved tight collaboration with security teams to transition to DevSecOps, this is even more true! Log management is part of how all these teams keep track of information and make vital business decisions. It’s important to take a moment to understand what is meant by log management.

Cyber crimes are expected to cost the world roughly $10.5 trillion per year by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. And these attacks don’t just cost money. Businesses impacted by these kinds of crimes can expect to experience not only financial losses but also loss of productivity, damage to their reputation, potential legal liabilities and more.

Faced with an important business decision? Do you have the data you need to make it? Odds are, you probably don’t. Or, if the data is captured somewhere, can you count on it being in one place and easily accessible? This is a common issue, easily solved by proper log management. This practice is vital for data-driven businesses, helping you maintain security, troubleshoot operations more quickly and enhance user experience.

There is value in the machine data (logs and events) from your infrastructure and applications. However, storing and analyzing that data to extract that value can be a big (and expensive) undertaking for organizations. With log analytics, companies like yours can better understand your log data and take action to improve reliability and increase security. Log files are produced by applications, operating systems, networks and other components of a technology stack.

I know you’re here to talk money, and I’ll get to pricing in just a moment, I promise! Let’s first look at how we ended up in a situation where log analytics is increasingly important to help set the stage for why transparent pricing is so vital in this arena.