Logging is an important part of understanding the behavior of your applications. Your logs contain essential records of application operations including database queries, server requests, and errors. With proper logging, you always have comprehensive, context-rich insights into application usage and performance. In this post, we’ll walk through logging options for Rails applications and look at some best practices for creating informative logs.

In a previous post, we walked through how you can configure logging for Rails applications, create custom logs, and use Lograge to convert the standard Rails log output into a more digestible JSON format. In this post, we will show how you can forward these application logs to Datadog and keep track of application behavior with faceted log search and analytics, custom processing pipelines, and log-based alerting.

From production monitoring to security concerns, it’s critical for businesses to analyze and review their log data. This is particularly true for large and enterprise companies, where the sheer amount of data makes log analysis the most efficient way to track key indicators. CTOs, in particular, are dealing with the challenges of this massive amount of data flowing through their organization, including how to harness it, gather insights from it, and secure it.

Sumo Logic is no different than most companies — we are in the service of our customers and we seek to build a product that they love. As we continue to refine the Sumo Logic platform, we’re also refining our feedback loops. One of those feedback loops is internal dogfooding and learning how our own internal teams such as engineering, sales engineering and customer success, experience the newest feature. However, we know that that approach can be biased.

The Sumo query language can be a source of joy and pain at times. Achieving mastery is no easy path and all who set on this path may suffer greatly until they see the light. The Log Operators Cheat Sheet is a valuable resource to learn syntax and semantics of the individual operators, but the bigger questions become “how can we tie them together” and “how can we write query language that matters?”

We are happy to announce the official launch of the Logz.io Community — a space for like-minded professionals dealing with the same challenges involved in developing, monitoring and troubleshooting business-critical apps and services.

Logtrail is a popular Kibana plugin that makes Kibana look like Papertrail. Sematext’s Logtrail view in Kibana gives you the terminal-like experience of exploring logs without the pain of needing to ssh into machines. With Logtrail you can see new logs appearing at the bottom of the screen instead of the top screen, you can filter logs like with grep, and “jump” to different parts of the log stream like when using less.

XpoLog 7 brings your data into a new age of log analysis and management. While the industry is focused on developing advanced search abilities and simplifying log analysis, nobody has been able to resolve the persistent issues of the long, complex and tedious deployments. Up until today! XpoLog 7 is proud to offer full automation of the entire log management lifecycle!

Outages and postmortems are a fact of life for any software engineer responsible for managing a complex system. And it can be safely said that those two words – “outage” and “postmortem,” do not carry any positive connotations in the remotest sense of the word.

Today, Sumo Logic is proud to announce that we have released 11 brand new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) applications to the existing Sumo Logic App Catalog.