Effective log analysis can help you significantly reduce the time spent investigating and troubleshooting incidents. With the many different log analysis platforms available, it can be overwhelming to choose and difficult to know what to look for. In this short guide, we’ll share the top three things you should consider when selecting a log analysis platform for your business.

Log analytics, log analysis, and log management tools have become essential in troubleshooting. With logging analysis tools – also known as network log analysis tools – you can extract meaningful data from logs to pinpoint the root cause of any app or system error, and find trends and patterns to help guide your business decisions, investigations, and security.

The main focus for cybersecurity teams — moving beyond compliance — is to deliver the level of security required to manage the likelihood of a breach and the potential impact to the business. This is more effective than simply focusing on the cost of delivering security services.

As you analyze your logs for application performance, infrastructure errors, system events, and more, sometimes you may need to look back to logs you were previously analyzing to help correlate events and identify the root cause of a problem. To help, we are excited to introduce Google Cloud Logging recent queries, to make it easy to track and run your past searches as you deep dive on your log data.

When you’re troubleshooting, issues seem to fall into two categories: issues based on an alert or error message where you have a good idea where to start and ones where you have no idea what’s going on. The first issues are usually straightforward. You use the information provided in the alert or error message to search the logs and pull up the relevant event messages.

Today we are officially releasing Graylog v3.3.6. This release includes a new enterprise output along with bug fixes that improve the functionality of Graylog. Please read on for a detailed description of the new output and the bug fixes. Many thanks to our community for reporting issues and contributing fixes!

Engineering teams that build, scale, and manage cloud-based applications on AWS know that at some point in time, their applications and infrastructure will be under attack. But as applications expand and new features are added, securing the full scope of an AWS environment becomes an increasingly complex task. To add visibility and auditability, AWS CloudTrail tracks the who, what, where, and when of activity that occurs in your AWS environment and records this activity in the form of audit logs.

Over the past several months we’ve been focused on improving observability and operations workflows for Compute Engine. Today, we are excited to share the first wave of these enhancements are now available. These include: Significantly improved operating system support for the Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging agents. The ability to rapidly deploy, update, and remove agents to groups of VMs, or all of your VMs, by policy, with as little as a single gcloud command.

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, security incidents related to it have been on the rise. Logs are indispensable resources for countering these threats, and they can be utilized for alerting, taking remedial action, and even preventing future attacks. In this post, we will examine ways to better secure cloud-native applications using logs.