Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Apache HTTP Server (httpd) is a widely used, open-source web server application. Because you can easily customize it through modules, it has become the go-to choice of both individuals powering their personal blogs and enterprises running high-traffic websites and web apps. It’s a well-known fact that with high traffic, the performance of Apache web servers can take a hit, experiencing bottlenecks as your traffic scales up, which will lead to delayed responses.

There’s an insidious disease increasingly afflicting DevOps teams. It begins innocuously. A team member suggests adding a new logging tool. The senior dev decides to upgrade the tooling. Then it bites. You’re spending more time navigating between windows than writing code. You’re scared to make an upgrade because it might break the toolchain. The disease is tool sprawl.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. While basic logs and metrics are available out of the box with Google Cloud Compute Engine (GCE), capturing advanced data used to require the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

This is a personal story from before I worked at observIQ. I am not a technical person in any professional sense. I have no direct training and my coding experience is limited to front-end web design and some indie game development. Before observIQ, all I knew about log management was that it has something to do with tracking computer performance and behavior, and I associated it mostly with DevOps and the cloud. I never imagined it would play any valuable role in my professional endeavors.