Log management

In any large organization, there will be different servers with different sets of applications. So, in this case, we need to have different teams for different applications whose task is to explore the log files for debugging any issue. However, this is not an easy task, as the format of logs is never user friendly. Here, I am talking about a single application, but what will happen if we ask the team to monitor all different applications that are built using different technologies and their log format is very different from other applications? The answer is very simple: the team has to dig through all the logs from the different servers and then they will spend days and nights to find the issue.

ELK Stack is very useful for these situations, and we can solve this problem easily. First of all, we need to set up a central Elasticsearch cluster for collecting all different logs. Now, we need to configure Logstash as per the application log so that we can transform different log formats that we are getting from different application servers. Logstash will output this data into Elasticsearch for storage so that we can explore, search, and update the data. Finally, Kibana can be used to display graphical dashboards on top of Elasticsearch.

Using this setup, anyone can get complete control of all logs coming from different sources. We can use Kibana to alert us to any issues in the log file so that the user can get the issue without doing any data drill downs.

Many organizations are using ELK for their log management as this is an open source software that can be built easily to monitor different type of logs on a single screen. Not only can we monitor all of our logs in a single screen, but we can also get alerts if something went wrong in the logs.