Understanding Event & Log Management Best Practices

Log management is considered one of the key elements when it comes to managing, maintaining and troubleshooting IT systems. However, the success that you can reap from log management will trickle down to the practices that you indulge in. Without setting the best practices in place, it can be quite easy for your staff to be overwhelmed with managing your logs, which could end up putting your business at risk of system or application issues.

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Here are some amazing practices to help you make the most of your log management efforts:

Structure Your Data

Your data should be easily readable and understood from a machine and human-readable perspective. Failing to understand specific logging formats will make it tough to come up with valuable insight from your log data. For instance, when using log4net to study log data that is in a format that is hard to understand, troubleshoot any problems in your application will be a challenge.

Common log structuring formats include KVP (key-value pair) and JSON. Both are easy to be understood by humans and also make it easy for software to extract resourceful data about the app from the semi-structured data formats. Ensure your data is structured in a way that makes it easy to analyze and understand.

Centralize Your Log Data

For optimal log management, logs should be separated from the production environment and shifted to a centralized location, according to a Tech Target article. Other than facilitating organized arrangement, this consolidation of logs enhances analysis by making it easy to identify the correlation of the collected data. In case the data is produced in an auto-scaling environment, you can prevent the loss of data ad hoc.

Centralizing the logs also allows the support team, and developers to gain access to the logs without necessarily gaining access to the production environment. As a result, the changes they make will have little to no effect on the environment. Since this consolidation makes duplication of logs easy, you can still retain your data even after hackers delete the original logs.

Practice End-To-End Logging

To overcome application issues and have a deeper understanding of how your app ticks, you ought to widely grasp the various aspects of your application through your logs. Most people think that logging is all about understanding the data from the server end. However, adding aspects such as end-user buy-in and even the underlying layers into the areas that you pay attention to when log monitoring is equally as important.

End-to-end user logging will give you enough insight to understand logging from the perspective of the end user. It will allow you to account for page loading times, network latency and even delays in database transactions. As a result, you can improve your user experience.

Leverage Real-Time Monitoring

Issues with your production can easily lead to undesirable outcomes such as having unhappy customers, missing data and even lost purchases, according to Provide Support. Since every second counts when dealing with production issues, then real-time monitoring can be quite crucial for smooth service delivery.

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Other than receiving notifications of any inconsistencies, having the ability to identify and solve these issues in real-time can turn out to be a lifesaver for your business. Such a capability will offer customers the power to analyze logs as users interact with the system. On the other hand, the support staff can deal with customer issues as they come in to prevent having a backlog of complaints.

Conclusion

Offering stellar services for your app is all about compliance and dealing with issues as they arise. As long as your customers are happy, then the cost of compliance will be worth your while. Consider adopting the above practices to smoothen your log management process.