It was great talking to Manoj Chaudhary CTO and V.P. of Engineering at Loggly. They had just helped one of their clients reduce server costs by an average of 33% by using centralized log data to understand application behavior and guide architectural decisions.

In addition to helping organizations get more performance from their infrastructure, centralized log management helps companies using containers reduce mean time to resolution while meeting service-level agreements. This improves the customer satisfaction of clients as well as end-user consumers.

An e-commerce company sends all its data from its website(s) and applications to a central log management provider. If a customer is looking for an item that’s out of stock, an alert can be sent to the company since exceptions generated by the application can be seen in real time.

Likewise, centralized log management can be used proactively to know when 404 errors have increased, when a key microservice is experiencing higher-than-normal process times, or when third-party API requests are timing out.

Centralized log management helps companies run auto-scaling infrastructure in the cloud. It captures critical data that would otherwise be lost when containers can come and go at any time. 

Security is enhanced with anomaly detection since the logs can tell if someone is attempting to log in to a server with an admin password or the number of API calls go from 20 one minute to 100 the next. Alerts can be sent to see if someone is trying to attack the site.

The future for centralized log management is bright with more data, arriving more quickly, from more containers. Logs will show the interdependencies between containers while continuing to facilitate debugging and provide information about infrastructure use.

There is still significant opportunity for companies to learn about what can be done with log management with regards to running aspects of their business more efficiently. As more DevOps and IT engineers are dealing with more containers and more logs they may find a centralized log management solution can save them time and help their companies run more efficiently.