Most log data winds up as an underutilized resource simply because it’s too hard to navigate. Worse yet, even when someone does take the time to navigate all that data, all too often it turns out that someone else in the organization ends up looking through all that same data too, looking for an answer to a question someone else in the organization already found months earlier.
Looking to make log data both more useful and easier to navigate, Logentries has enhanced its namesake software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for managing log data with support for real-time team annotations, shareable performance dashboards and instant group notifications.
Logentries Chief Scientist Trevor Parsons says that rather than reinventing the log data analysis wheel for every event, Logentries enables IT organizations to leverage the insights gained from that data in perpetuity. Via open application programming interfaces (APIs), Parsons says those insights can be more easily shared both inside and out of the organization.
Rather than building a log management application and all the associated analytics, Logentries is making the case that log management is best handled via the cloud. After all, the value in the logs generated by systems is not so much the raw data as it is the insights obtained in correlating it all. Investing in the applications and infrastructure required to derive business value from all that data is beyond the means of most organizations. Given the amount of collaboration routinely required to solve an IT problem, having access to all the relevant data also makes a lot more sense for all concerned.
The degree to which organizations need access to log data varies widely. But with the increased sophistication of IT attacks and the rising complexity of the IT environment itself, the IT staff is spending more time combing through log data than ever before. The end goal should be to get them in and out of the data as quickly as possible.
