All projects have some form of logging. Commonly used for debug messages, and to give developers an excuse when they have nothing else to do – “I’m improving our logging”. Every project has a different standard for logging, and that includes things like the format used, the context that gets output with the log, what actually gets output to a log, where the logs get output, how many different log files there are, etc.
What all projects have in common is that logs contain a lot of information, a lot of information that is particularly hard to search through, analyze, organize, and visualize. This is where log analytics tools come in. They provide an easy way to store, search, analyze, and visualize that information. Unfortunately, in my experience, they are rarely used.
During this session we will:
- Go over some commonly used log analytics tools.
- Identify some of the major benefits that log analytics tools provide.
- Go over a minimal setup using Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Mimir, so you can easily implement a similar setup for your own project.
The log files are already there, there is no reason not to benefit further from them.
