MGT Cloud Log: Makes Log Management Easy
Log management is collecting, consolidating, analyzing, storing, visualizing, and troubleshooting large voluminous logs from different servers, applications, and frameworks. This centralized log aggregation is aimed to provide real-time insights from cloud-native log analysis.
Over the last eight years, we, from MGT-Commerce, have learned from our customers how business-critical errors are, especially if you don’t notice them directly. A Magento shop with an auto-scaling environment with multiple web servers, you need a convenient logging solution to have an overview of your online shop’s health.
MGT Cloud Log provides a fully managed log solution for rapid troubleshooting and exploration. All your log data is available and accessible in one central log application through the MGT Cloud Log.
Parameters to a Complete Log Management Process
There are some parameters to a complete Log Management process:
- Collection
- Search
- Storage
- Correlation
- Output
Collection
All businesses need to collect logs over encrypted channels. Their log management solution should come equipped with logs, but it should recommend the most reliable. Organizations must use agent-based collection whenever possible, as this method is generally more secure and reliable than its agentless counterparts.
Search
An organization needs to make sure they can find their logs once they store them, so they should index their records so that they are discoverable via REGEX, plaintext, and API queries. A complete log management solution should enable companies to optimize each log search with classification tags and filters. It should also allow them to conduct broad and detailed queries, view raw logs, and compare multiple queries at once.
Storage
Once collected, organizations need to compress, encrypt, preserve, store, and archive their logs. Companies can search for additional functionality in their log management solution, such as specify where they can store their logs geographically. This kind of feature can help meet their requirements and ensure scalability.
Correlation
The organization needs to create rules that they can use to detect exciting events and perform automated actions. Of course, many events don’t occur on a single host in a single log. For that reason, organizations should look for a log management solution that lets them create correlation rules according to the requirements and unique threats their environments face. They should also lookout for a tool that allows them to import other data sources such as asset inventories and vulnerability scans.
Output
Finally, the organization needs to distribute log information to different groups and users using reports, dashboards, and e-mail. Their log management solution must facilitate that exchange of data with the security team and other systems.
Why is Log Management Important?
Why is log management so important for a successful company out there? The answer to this is quite simple and complicated at the same time.
There are many benefits of using a systematic approach to your logs, a few of which are:
- System Monitoring and Alert
- Unified Storage
- Improved Security
- Data Analytics
- Better Troubleshooting
System Monitoring and Alert
Log Management tools provide real-time alerts that help you to react as soon as an issue occurs. This is essential in case of a security breach where each second can mean more and more damage to the system. For security and troubleshooting, monitoring settings can be adjusted to track the selection of the events.
Unified Storage
Another advantage of log management lies in unified storage, which we discussed when discussing centralized log aggregation. Having all logs in one place makes any analysis much more straightforward, but the real advantage of unified storage is enhancing your system security.
Since this is the time frame where the time between when a threat first occurs and when you take action can make a huge difference, storing important log information boosts the complete process. Centralized logging also means having standard log data, saving time when looking for information across logs from different sources.
Improved Security
The IT environment will be highly secured against the attackers, thanks to the 24/7 real-time monitoring and alerts.
By monitoring login and logout events, you can detect any suspicious behavior before it's too late.
Data Analytics
With time, companies are starting to understand that the data stored contains valuable information. Therefore, data analytics packs with several processes such as transforming and cleansing data with the goal to create a data model that can predict behavior and help make business decisions.
Better Troubleshooting
Log Management gives better control of your IT environment and a better view of the processes. The common uses of event logs for detecting issues are for network troubleshooting. Real-time alerts significantly reduce the time required to detect and address a problem. Still, log management tools' real work lies in log analytics.
Log Management has built-in fast query language-based search, centralized logging and parsing, and support for a custom application like IIS, Cassandra, Apache, and more.
Log Management also helps you track and fix a wide array of problems, including:
- UI unresponsiveness
- External database call failure
- File upload failure
- Dynamic user input verification
Log management is the need of every store due to the high volume of traffic and processing.
The biggest challenge with logs is the overwhelming amount of data. In many cases, tech pros aren’t actively mining and analyzing the data gathered in logs. It’s understandable why—no one wants to review a high volume of logs each day manually. But since event data can be the first sign service or key application is running out of resources or experiencing an increase in demand, businesses need to invest in proper log management tools and best practices to make sure they’re getting the most out of their data.
Log Management for Developers
The one thing developers and DevOps rely on is log reports. It is important to identify where the bugs are located. monitoring for errors, debugging, and troubleshooting are some important parts of software development.
Why is Log Management Necessary for Developers?
Log management helps developers sort missing code and real bugs from common false errors. That is done by differentiating serious problems and flagged issues from beginning ones.
The logs are converted into the easier-to-understand format – perfect for performance reports and statuses. Mainly helpful to explain to less tech-savvy people.
Log management applications can be deployed to monitor code in parts of the program for which developers don’t have complete access but want to check how they work.
Challenges Faced in Log Management
Just like other Management processes, Log Management comes with its issues and challenges. Data analysis should be comprehensive as the logs generated are in high volumes to obtain real-time and best log management issues.
The most common challenges include:
- To switch tabs to monitor logs from different sources.
- Correlation of the blogs is necessary for proper understanding.
- The organization generates a massive amount of logs that need to be adequately tracked and filtered.
- Identifying log issues, like exceptions, timeouts, and delays. Prompt alerts for IT admins regarding crucial issues.
- Automating appropriate management parameters. Knowing What and when to automate to analyze carefully.
While cloud computing and virtual storage have solved some of the basic log management challenges, modern applications bring in additional and a variety of challenges.
- Log collection, monitoring, alerting, and shipping must all be done in real-time so that teams can jump into troubleshooting immediately.
- Logs come in all kinds of formats that need to be supported.
- Distributed systems produce large volumes of data that are both difficult to query and expensive to store.
- Cloud-based architecture requires efficient logging, analysis tools, proactive monitoring, alerts, automation, and reporting, which are not supported by traditional log management.
Modern log management systems have Five functions – aggregation, log collection, visualization, search and analysis, monitoring and alerting, and reporting – that can help overcome these logging challenges. Also, these functions should be built on top of cloud principles like high availability, resiliency, scalability, and automation.
Log Management Best Practices
Log management best practices start by briefly covering logging, monitoring, and its importance. Following are the log management best practices to adopt:
1. Invest in Tools
Log management software automates many tasks involved in event log management. Some businesses might make the mistake of building their log monitoring infrastructures. But if time and cost are a concern, this isn’t recommended. There are plenty of affordable log management tools providing value right off the shelf.
2. Know What to Monitor
It’s essential to plan what you need to monitor and what you don’t need to monitor. Organizations often make the mistake of believing something should be logged simply because it can be logged. This will have a negative effect on your log management practice since logging too many data points can make it harder to find the most critical data. It also adds costs and complexity to your log storage.
On the other hand, it’s essential to log any production environment data critical for daily application development or workflows. Likewise, you can log any data helpful for troubleshooting the performance issues or solving user experience problems. The information from these logs will provide direct value to your daily operations.
3. Centralized Logging
Moving all log data into one central, accessible location is called Centralized Log Management. Having all logs collected in one location makes log management easier. Centralized logging tools can help you organize data from different sources, search for specific logs, and enforce retention policies, so logs remain available during particular times. It also makes sharing log data easier so you can share it with other business associates.
4. Develop Log Security
Log data usually contains sensitive information, so organizations need to select a service offering the best and complete control over the data. The first thing for tech teams hoping to keep their data secure is to ensure they’re using secure data transmission services. Enhanced transfer protocols allow technicians to encrypt all sensitive log data before sending files to a trusted partner.
Other critical security features include role-based access control and secure accounts. With these unique features, users can be assigned login credentials, and technicians can set unique permissions to keep the data safe and monitored.
5. Scalable Services
Log data take up a lot of space, which can create problems further when critical system errors occur and accelerate log file growth due to increased error rates. This unpredictability is a headache and expensive for tech teams to manage manually. Businesses should invest in a hosted cloud solution capable of automatically scaling to save time and money when log generation fluctuates.
MGT Cloud Log
With MGT Cloud Log, we provide a fully managed turnkey solution for our customers with pre-configured log streams like:
- NGINX Access and Error Log
- PHP-FPM Error Log
- MySQL Slow Query Log
- Magento Exception and System Logs
- Magento Reports
- Mail Log
MGT Cloud Log is included in our Auto-Scaling Plans, and smaller plans can order it as an add-on.
Read here everything about the benefits of AWS Auto Scaling with Varnish for your e-commerce business.
Why Does Your Business Need it?
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Rapid troubleshooting and exploration Enable developers to identify and fix issues.
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Strengthen Security and Compliance Ensure compliance with HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and much more.
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Lightning Search Search hours of logs typically in seconds.
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Security Identify and stop threats. Trigger alerts from common threats.
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Logging without Limits Send and process every log produced by your applications and infrastructure.
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Fully Managed & Supported Fully managed and supported by your experts 24/7/365.
Features of MGT Cloud Log
Following are some exclusive features of MGT Cloud Log, which provide ease to customers:
Easy to use dashboard with live stream
Innovative and easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your log messages.
Message View & Share Link
Detailed log message information with a direct link to share with others.
Saved Searches for quick access and alerting
To provide you ease by saving searches for quicker access and alerts.
E-Mail and Webhook Alerting
Get notified via E-Mail or use Webhooks to send the notifications to third-party services like slack.
User Management
Users with different roles and granular permissions can be created.
MGT Cloud Log Pricing
MGT Cloud Log is included in our Auto Scaling plans. However, it can be added as an extra feature to all other Managed Hosting Plans as well. It's a fully managed turnkey.
The solution is supported by our experts 24/7.
Conclusion
Managing a full-scale solution for Log Management requires a considerable amount of planning. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done- of course; it can be. You just need to plan carefully and precisely.
Log management is the solution for every company to maintain and analyze its data. By analyzing with a centralized solution, maintain and improve your application's easy-to-use performance, and quickly identify and correct issues effectively.
MGT Cloud Log provides the easy and the best solution for Log Management. CONTACT US to know more.
Why MGT Cloud Log?
If you search for centralized logging solutions, you find plenty of them. There are excellent solutions on the market, like the ELK Stack with Kibana. The problem of these solutions is that you need to invest a lot of time to learn how they work and how to ingest data.
MGT-Commerce claims to provide first-class solutions for Log Management through MGT Cloud Log to our customers, but we also want to provide outstanding support if something is not working as expected.
EndNote
Log management is made easy to the users by MGT Cloud Log by solving all the challenges and issues. Ensuring the customer gets the best of its benefits and the resources provided, MGT Cloud Log offers a one-stop solution.
Do you have more questions on how to make your log management easy and convenient? Contact us now for a free consultation about log management and high-performance Magento hosting on AWS.
