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The 5 Best Methods for Drawing Insight out of Machine Data

  • The 5 Best Methods for Drawing Insight out of Machine Data-

    Request Logs

    Data contained in requests made to the server are logged in files. Referrer, remote address, user agent, header data, status codes, response data, etc., can be captured. It usually comes from an application module, library or SDK handles recording the requests and formatting the data being logged.

    Why is this important? Almost any data within the stack can be logged – from server, application and client performance to user activities. Log data can be filtered, aggregated and then analyzed via visualization tools to assess most aspects of your product and underlying infrastructure.

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The 5 Best Methods for Drawing Insight out of Machine Data

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  • The 5 Best Methods for Drawing Insight out of Machine Data-4

    Request Logs

    Data contained in requests made to the server are logged in files. Referrer, remote address, user agent, header data, status codes, response data, etc., can be captured. It usually comes from an application module, library or SDK handles recording the requests and formatting the data being logged.

    Why is this important? Almost any data within the stack can be logged – from server, application and client performance to user activities. Log data can be filtered, aggregated and then analyzed via visualization tools to assess most aspects of your product and underlying infrastructure.

The pursuit of data-driven decision making has put tracking, logging and monitoring at the forefront of the minds of product, sales and marketing teams. Engineers are generally familiar with gathering and tracking data to maintain and optimize infrastructure and application performance. However, with the power of data, other business groups are clamoring for the latest tools and instrumentation. Quite often the expense of implementation is undersold as merely placing a tag on a site or adding a library, and doesn’t take into account the additional expense of tracking unique aspects of the application. To complicate matters, there is usually quite a bit of confusion on the types of data being captured by the tools a company already has in place.

In this slideshow, Thomas Overton, from the Sumo Logic Developer Community, offers the five best methods for gaining insight from machine data.