AppOptics and Loggly – Better Together
Operating a Complex Web Application Requires a Bird’s-Eye View of Logs
When you’re running a cloud-based service in production, there’s a lot that can go wrong – and likewise, a lot to keep your eyes on. Most developers and operations professionals understand that summaries of “what’s going on” are more valuable than trying to make decisions by watching a raw stream of log events. That’s why many people like to start troubleshooting using operational dashboards.
Dashboards are a great way to keep track of a defined group of conditions or key performance indicators that keep you abreast of your application’s health. They’re a common entity in nearly any analytics tool and generically are meant to show you at a glance anything you regularly search for ( error counts, server utilization, feature usage, etc over time) or have as part of your “sanity check” to be confident in the health of your service.
However, dashboards have an important limitation: They are summaries of static queries or measurement you set up in the past. That is, you need to know ahead of time what to track and measure. And not all operational problems will manifest themselves through these known data points since perhaps they never happened before or you arent specifically looking for it.
Hence, your awesome, curated dashboard inherently always has some blind-spots.
Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer generates real-time log summaries that give you insights about the known, the likely, and even the unknown. This is possible since all data we ingest gets processed through our Dynamic Fields engine, which will automatically catalog and do some quick analysis on your data. This means by the time you log in you have access to real-time summaries of the fields and values in your data, even if you are looking at a custom subset of your logs (i.e you’ve already searched or filtered).
These summaries are really useful for:
Here are the recommendations I give customers about how best to use Field Explorer and Loggly dashboards to keep their applications running at their best.
If you don’t yet have your Loggly account, you can put my recommendations into place really quickly by starting a free trial. If you’re an existing Loggly customer, be aware that you’ll need a Standard, Pro, or Enterprise account in order to create dashboards.
Hector Angulo
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