Unifying Enterprise Log Analysis
360-degree view of enterprise logs and point-in-time root cause analysis
Problem Statement
IT infrastructure optimization is paramount to the success of any organization. However, organizations take a reactive approach to address this need after realizing cost overruns or bottlenecks in the IT infrastructure. The need of the hour is to have a proactive approach to accomplish desired goals.
Enterprise logging considered as an afterthought. But without logging, organizations won’t have critical visibility into the IT infrastructure internals to diagnose and debug efficiently. What’s more, for a large enterprise, it may be violating compliance requirements.
Root cause analysis of critical and recurring problems holds an important facet in an enterprise. Lack of enterprise level logging and log correlations (system, apps, etc.) turn out to be very challenging for the organization to take meaningful decision on timely manner.
Solution
This solution advocates the need of enterprise logging as a coherent process to collect, unify, and analyze logs to ensure logging fulfills its potential to be an invaluable system of record. It also recommends for a federate approach for cloud and on-premise service model.
This solution not only offers one-stop solution for the operations team to get complete insight and foresight of IT infrastructure, but also empowers IT infrastructure management to strategize and control the functions responsible for diverse technical operations.
High Level Architecture
Metadata Repository
Technical metadata stored in the form of key/value pair to drive business process and it provides highly scalable & configurable options to change the state of data. Whereas, operational metadata stored in structured/tabular format and is gathered from process/job workflows.
Log Collector & Indexer
Log Collector & Indexer service is the backbone of enterprise logging solution, as it categorizes/collates logs for low latency searching. A search engine is best fit to suffice the purpose.
Log Correlation
Log correlation service applies pattern matching algorithm to harmonize system, application, incident and, operational logs. It helps to discover and apply logical associations among disparate log events.
Log Visualizations and Dashboard
Log Visualizations and Dashboard service utilized by operations team to visualize enterprise logs in real-time and enables to setup alerts/notifications for critical issues for quick resolution.
Low Level Architecture
Conclusion
Letting enterprise logging layer become an afterthought can have serious consequences for business. Following these recommendations ensures that enterprise logging is not only supporting compliance needs, but also achieving the goals necessary to help business run smoothly and effectively.
