Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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How to collect, customize, and manage Rails application logs

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.

Collecting and monitoring Rails logs with Datadog

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.

Feature Focus: Audit Log

Accountability is an important part of the work IT professionals do, especially when it comes to security and outages. A minor change by a single tech or engineer can crash entire systems, and it’s sometimes crucial to question that person on their methods and changes to determine a solution. Accountability is especially important when several people are regularly using the same tool.

Mattermost Recipe: Handling Incidents with Mattermost and PagerDuty

Here’s the next installment in our Mattermost Recipes series. The goal of these posts is to provide you with solutions to specific problems, as well as a discussion about the details of the solution and some tips about how to customize it to suit your needs perfectly.

Restricting CFEngine to one CPU core using Systemd

In some performance critical situations, it makes sense to limit management software to a single CPU (core). We can do this using systemd and cgroups. CFEngine already provides systemd units on relevant platforms, we just need to tweak them. I’m using CFEngine Enterprise 3.12 on CentOS 7, but the steps should be very similar on other platforms/versions.

Monitoring and securing Java apps at Quby.

Moving to a Docker-based cloud for Java apps orchestrated by Mesos Marathon required a different approach to monitoring and security for Quby, the Amsterdam-based developer of smart home solutions and maker of smart thermostat and service platform ‘Toon.’ That’s when they found Sysdig. The Sysdig Cloud-Native Intelligence Platform helps Quby resolve issues faster, and reduces monitoring system administration effort by 400%.