Linux is one of the most popular operating systems today, powering a large portion of the Internet. According to W3Techs, almost half of today’s top-ranked 1 million websites currently run on Linux systems. So, if you want your site—and the application(s) running on it—to be high-performing with lots of uptime, you need to ensure the availability and reliability of your Linux-based servers.

The evolution of machine data and logging in general has shifted multiple times over the last couple of decades. The log began with Unix and was rooted in command line actions like tail or grep. It evolved from system-based logs to application-based logs and eventually became more UI-friendly and readable. Not only has the log itself evolved, but the purpose of the log and audience for the log has morphed over time as well.

Some things just go better together. Like barbeque and blues, sunsets and beaches, cheese and fine wine — hey, even software and superheroes go better together! That’s why in this blog we are going to look at why IT Operations and Observability just go better together, through a superhero analogy. Enter the Dark Knight himself — Batman! He will represent observability. IT Operations will be represented by Lucius Fox.

There’s an old saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t ring true when it comes to data breaches and ransomware attacks. High profile security incidents continue to make headlines, and those headlines are impacting bottom lines. In response to these, the US federal government is modernizing its own cybersecurity infrastructure, and more state governments are implementing laws to protect citizens.

The massive proliferation of log data forces teams to manage the costs to process, route, and store it. Teams need access to this data to gain critical insights into their services, but for many organizations this presents a challenge for their budget. Logging can get expensive, fast, which often results in teams making difficult tradeoffs between aggregating enough logging information to be useful and controlling the cost of storing all those logs.

Observability is a term that is becoming commonplace in both startups and enterprises. Log observability is different from monitoring, as it provides visualized metrics from a variety of different systems in a single pane of glass view. This is invaluable for organizations to understand the interdependencies and links between external events and internal performance.