What is a log management tool?

Not all log management tools are created equal. Here’s what to look for.

Log management and analysis tools provide you real-time visualization of how your users are interacting with your apps and systems. Many of these log management tools include a sophisticated visual dashboard to immediately analyze data. They also offer your DevSecOps teams deeper insights and possibilities to enhance code quality, boost productivity and reduce risks.

What should the best log management tools do for your team to be successful?

What is log management?

Log management is a continuous process of collecting, analyzing, and retaining log data over time. With log management, DevOps, site reliability engineering and security teams are able to monitor and enhance performance, find problems and defects and enhance security. Log data from various applications and infrastructure, once collected, can be analyzed and used to gain insight into business, security, and operational performance.

Your DevSecOps teams may access data from on-premises, cloud and hybrid settings with log management processes:

1. Instrument and collect: The first step in log management is to gather up all the information into one place. Imagine how annoying it would be to go to every server, application, and network device individually! Syslog or apps that write their logs directly into the centralized log management over HTTP can be used for collection. Using schema-on-read will save you a significant amount of time since the data won't need to be organized or uniform until you go to actually use it.

2. Centralize and index: Next, your logs will need to be in one central location and indexed for visibility and ease of use. The use of centralized logs guarantees that you never have to manually "grep" (command-line tool that searches for matching text) logs of interest from various systems across several servers. Similar to Google, indexing enables DevSecOps teams to easily search for any term across all their logs.

3. Search and evaluate: Now comes the fun part, well, fun to some folks—searching and using the information in your logs! You can perform evaluations manually or use native machine learning to find outliers or compare trends.

4. Monitor and alert: The fun isn’t over yet! You’ll need to continuously monitor insights from log data to ensure that users are warned of issues in a timely manner. This is a snap with great software (like we offer at Sumo Logic), especially with features like dynamic thresholds and analytics driven by machine learning assisting.

5. Log report and dashboard: The last piece of the puzzle is the ongoing reporting. It’s important to have sophisticated software that automates the reporting of log information. This gives you insight into operational performance, resource allocation, security or legal compliance, and more. But make sure the log management solution you select has RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) — this allows you the control over secure and scoped access to the information that teams need to operate.

A log management system lets you collect data in one location and view it as a whole rather than as individual components. As a result, you can analyze the gathered log data to recognize issues and patterns and create a clear, visual representation of how each of your systems is functioning at any given time.

What are log management tools?

Log management tools continuously collect, analyze, and retain log data over time. This data can then be used to offer dynamic performance monitoring and real-time alerting to give organizations more visibility and understanding of the security, effectiveness and health of their systems. Logs are produced in large quantities across multiple tiers of applications and infrastructure. When gathered and put to use, logs can provide crucial insights.

In order to create simple-to-understand charts, maps and summaries of company activities, log management software filters the enormous quantity of data and transforms it all into manageable information. To achieve this, a comprehensive log management tool should:

• Improve availability and performance with unified log management
  Raw data can provide you with information on what occurred with a specific element of your stack, but centralized log management offers much more. The easiest approach to correlate issues and pinpoint the reason when anything goes wrong is to see log dashboards all at once.

• Simplify security and compliance with centralized log management
  With a dedicated log management tool, your IT teams have all the information they need to decide what is worth examining when threat detection is identified more quickly. These tools can assist you in stopping breaches, identifying indications of compromise (IOCs) and transforming your data into useful threat information with a unified log management system.

• Offer one-click integrations with AWS, Azure, and GCP services
  Cloud architectures demand a modern approach of logging and monitoring for full-stack visibility. You may consolidate huge amounts of cloud logs to conduct analytics that generate business, operational and security insights.

• Provide multi-cloud support with multiple apps and native integrations
  You can get out-of-the-box visibility into the technologies that power your applications with real-time visibility into AWS, Azure and GCP cloud apps and infrastructure.

Which tool is used for monitoring and logging?

With tools like Sumo Logic, DevSecOps teams monitor logs in real-time and save important historical data using log and security analytics with integrated threat intelligence. The performance of every component of the stack is made more accessible by using simple dashboards and data visualizations to help you analyze and translate logging events.

For machine data insights, Sumo Logic’s platform features built-in pattern identification, anomaly detection, outlier detection and predictive analytics. With Sumo Logic, our customers ensure application reliability, modern threat protection and gain infrastructure insights. Learn how our log analytics solutions can help your business.