Pernod Ricard is the toast of the wine and spirits industry, with a comprehensive portfolio that includes brands such as Jameson, Absolut Vodka, and Havana Club. While the $53 billion company has thrived on traditional distribution channels such as restaurants, clubs, stores, and duty-free shops, Pernod Ricard has recently focused on growing its direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce business.

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.