Logging and Monitoring

❓What is it

• Logging and monitoring are two different processes that work together to provide a range of data points that help track the health and performance of your infrastructure. Monitoring uses application metrics to measure availability and manage performance. Logging creates a record of log events generated from applications, devices, or web servers that serves as a detailed record of occurrences within a system.

👥Who

• This is usually performed by a DevOps person or overarching application support team

🛠 Running the technique

• Make sure that your monitoring tool supports your application's programming language to ensure compatibility and ease of use.
• Log the right data - Log data needs to tell a succinct but complete story. Helpful log data generally includes actionable items, and includes information such as a timestamp, user IDs, session IDs, and resource-usage metrics.
• Collecting a full range of applicable data enhances the information obtained from your monitoring tool.
• Streamline your data by making it easier to search, index, and store be ensuring that it is structured, offering a more complete view as to what happened, and can provide your monitoring tool with unique identifiers such as which account ID experienced the error.
• Identify application and system trends by applying statistical analysis to system events. Use the historical information provided by log data to determine averages that will make it easier to definitively identify anomalies, or to group event types in a way that allows for accurate comparisons.

📖Additional Material

(Reference ITIL 4 framework)