One of the unintended side-effects of the public cloud is the enablement of a platform-agnostic cloud architecture. This means that it’s now easier than ever to mix offerings from multiple vendors (cloud vendors in this case) to form a single application or service-based solution. There is one gotcha, however: log management.

Today’s applications are marvels of distributed systems development. Each function or service that makes up an application may be executing on a different system, based upon a different system architecture, that is housed in a different geographical location, and written in a different computer language.