What is a log management tool?

Not all log management tools are created equal. Here’s what to look for.

Log management and log analysis tools provide real-time visualization of how users interact with your apps and systems. Many of these log management tools include a sophisticated visual dashboard to immediately analyze data. They also offer your DevSecOps teams deeper insights and possibilities to enhance code quality, boost productivity and reduce risks.

What should the best log management tools do for your team to be successful?

What is log management?

Log management is a continuous process of collecting, analyzing and retaining log data or log files over time. With log management, DevOps, site reliability engineering and security teams are able to monitor performance, find problems and defects and identify security threats. Once collected, log data from various applications and infrastructure can be analyzed and used to gain insight into business, security and operational performance.

Your DevSecOps teams may access data from on-premises, cloud and hybrid settings with log management processes:

1. Instrument and collect: The first step in log management is to gather all the information into one place as part of a process known as log aggregation. Imagine how annoying it would be to go to every server, application and network device individually! Each data source has query logs. Syslog, or apps that write their log message directly into the centralized log management over HTTP, can be used for collection. Using schema-on-read will save you significant time since the data won't need to be organized or uniform until you use it.
2. Centralize and index: Next, your logs will need to be in one central location and indexed for visibility and ease of use; this is known as log collection. Centralized logs guarantee that you never have to manually "grep" (a command-line tool that searches for matching text) a log file of interest from various systems across several servers. Similar to Google, indexing enables DevSecOps teams to easily search for any term across all their logs, or in other words, perform log queries.
3. Search and evaluate: Now comes the fun part, well, fun to some folks—searching and using the information in your logs. You can perform evaluations manually or use native machine learning to see trends, find outliers or compare time periods.
4. Monitor and alert: Continuous log monitoring of insights from log data ensures that users are warned of critical events in a timely manner. This, along with creating custom alerts, is a snap with great software (like we offer at Sumo Logic), especially with features like dynamic thresholds and analytics driven by machine learning assisting.
5. Log report and dashboard: The last puzzle piece is ongoing reporting. It’s important to have sophisticated software that automates the reporting of event log information. This gives you insight into operational performance, resource allocation, security or l compliance and other metrics. But make sure the log management solution you select has Role-based access control (RBAC) — this gives you control over secure and scoped access to the information that teams need to operate.

A log management system lets you collect log file data in one location and view it as a whole rather than as individual components. As a result, you can analyze the gathered log data and metrics to recognize issues and patterns and create a clear visual representation of how your systems function at any given time.

Log Analytics and Alert Response to reduce MTTR

What are log management tools?

Log management tools continuously collect, analyze and retain log files over time. This log event data can then offer dynamic performance monitoring and real-time alerting to give organizations more visibility and understanding of the security posture, efficiency and health of their systems. Logs are produced in large quantities across multiple tiers of applications and infrastructure. When gathered and put to use, logs can provide crucial insights.

To create simple-to-understand charts, maps and summaries of company activities, log management software filters enormous data and transforms it into manageable information. To achieve this, a comprehensive log management tool should:

• Improve reliability and performance with unified log management
  Raw data can provide information on what occurred with a specific element of your stack, but centralized log management offers much more. The easiest approach to correlate issues and pinpoint the reason when anything goes wrong is to see log dashboards all at once.
• Simplify security and compliance with centralized log management
  With a dedicated log management tool, your IT teams have all the information they need to decide what is worth examining when threat detection is identified more quickly. These tools can assist you in stopping breaches, identifying indications of compromise (IOCs) and transforming your data into useful threat information with a unified log management system.
• Offer one-click integrations with AWS, Azure, and GCP services
  Cloud architectures demand a modern approach to logging and monitoring for full-stack visibility. You may consolidate huge amounts of cloud logs to conduct log analytics that generate business, operational and security insights.
• Provide multi-cloud support with multiple apps and native integrations
  You can get out-of-the-box visibility into the technologies that power your applications with real-time visibility into AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud apps and infrastructure.

Which tool is used for monitoring and logging?

With a log analysis tool like Sumo Logic, DevSecOps teams monitor logs in real-time and save important historical data using log and security analytics with integrated threat intelligence. The performance of every stack component is made more accessible by using simple dashboards and data visualizations to help you analyze and translate audit logs.

For machine data insights, Sumo Logic’s platform features built-in pattern identification, anomaly detection, outlier detection and predictive analytics. With Sumo Logic, our customers ensure application reliability and modern threat protection and gain infrastructure insights. Learn how our log analytics solution can help your business.