log monitoring

The role of log management and analysis in any digital business is hard to overestimate. With their help, you get actionable insights on user behavior, system health, reasons for errors you may run into from time to time, etc. 

Since the number of logs can quickly increase, you may have multiple servers instances accepting incoming traffic. Hence, It’s crucial to introduce some centralized but, at the same time, easily scalable environment to collect and view your application logs. Luckily in the age of сloud computing, there is a solution to this dilemma. 

Cloud-based services for log management offer a more agile way of controlling computing and resource allocation. Giving a preference to a cloud-based log-analyzer over on-premise tools will help you make logs easily shareable, memory dedicated for them easily expandable, and the viewing process more user-friendly. Let’s check the advantages of the cloud for managing logs in more detail: 

Reduced load and system performance improvements

With cloud services for log management, your logs are stored and processed on separate cloud storage. Thus the physical resources of your system such as CPU or RAM are not used for aggregating and processing the logs. This way, the load on your system is reduced, and you can free these capacities for other internal needs. 

Another benefit of adopting a cloud tool for processing your logs is improvements in the system performance. The more logs you have to manage, the more complexity is added to the system. When operating huge data masses in real-time, it’s essential to use additional software for stream processing like Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or other alternatives to prevent overload and operation slowdown. Not to mention the time your team would need to configure the system properly. Opting for a cloud solution, all these responsibilities are delegated to your LaaS provider. 

Cost optimization

While, as a rule, cloud services are considered more expensive than on-premise ones, this does not include money and effort spent on maintenance and support for the latter. When you decide to use an on-premise tool and manage the logs on your own, it always means the additional allocation of human and financial resources. You will need your team to learn how to support the tool and troubleshoot the issues in the process. With a cloud log analyzing tool, all these expenses are already included in the price of your plan, so in fact, you spend less than with traditional monitoring. 

Increased scalability

Scalability is probably one of the best features the cloud can offer. With traditional monitoring, you will need to think about the hardware capacities beforehand, and if there’s a system overload, there may be some slowness in log aggregation and analysis. With the cloud, resources scale when you need them, so there will be no delays in finding, filtering, or processing the logs.

The choice of the cloud platform for log monitoring and its implementation is not an easy task as it requires thorough planning and the choice of vendor. So make sure to check the following parameters before making the final decision:

  • Price versus included features (some low-cost solutions may be limited in traffic or storage)
  • Compliance with data protection laws (logs may contain personal information, so it’s critical to have a possibility to delete them upon user request)
  • Availability of data recovery and regular backups.
  • Easiness of migration (both from your current system and when you need to switch providers).
  • Availability of free demo or a trial period (to test if the solution can cover your needs).

As you may see by the benefits outlined above, the efforts on cloud adoption for log management are worth it, so if you want to ensure more reliability and optimize your business processes, it’s high time to choose your cloud log analyzer and start enjoying all its advantages.