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Logging to Infinity and Beyond

Exploring the hidden value of your logs

Michael Bogan
Better Programming
6 min readSep 29, 2023

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Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash

If your environment is like many others, it can often seem like your systems produce logs filled with excess data. Since you need to access multiple components (servers, databases, network infrastructure, applications, etc.) to read your logs — and they don’t typically have any specific purpose or focus holding them together — you may dread sifting through them.

If you don’t have the right tools, it can feel like you’re stuck with disparate, hard-to-parse data. In these situations, I picture myself as a cosmic collector, gathering space debris as it floats by my ship and sorting the occasional good material from the heaps of galactic material.

Though it can feel more trouble than it’s worth, sorting through logs is crucial. Logs hold many valuable insights into what’s happening in your applications and can indicate performance problems, security issues, and user behavior. In this article, we will look at how logging can help you make sense of your log data without much effort. We’ll talk about best practices and habits and use some of the Log Analytics tools from Sumo Logic as examples. Let’s blast off and turn that cosmic trash into treasure!

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Michael Bogan
Michael Bogan

Written by Michael Bogan

25 years of startups, products, and software architecture. Currently run DevSpotlight — tech content for tech companies. michael@devspotlight.com.

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