Last updated at Fri, 03 Nov 2017 17:49:36 GMT
We’re all familiar with the concept of “Elasticity” – the way cloud infrastructures can automatically react to their required workloads, scaling resources up or down as needed. While elastic environments provide us with much needed flexibility, they have also historically presented challenges when trying to monitor activity from their ephemeral components. Automatically accounting for new nodes can be tricky while scaling up. And when scaling down, data associated with these nodes is potentially lost if it hasn’t yet been captured, stored and indexed.
This month, Logentries is introducing “Elastic Logging” – autonomous, real-time log management and analytics for highly distributed, highly ephemeral systems. As more organizations continue to move their architecture to the cloud, and others migrate their formerly monolithic applications into hundreds or thousands of lightweight containers, having an established elastic logging solution is critical to effective system monitoring.
Elastic Logging is a service that scales for you, automatically ingesting data of any source, size and format without the need for further configuration by the end user. In addition to this “on-demand scalability,” a truly elastic logging service should be one that reacts and delivers results in real-time, keeping up with the constant changes in your own environment – especially if that environment is one of containerized microservices.
On-demand Scalability
When working with a scalable architecture, having a monitoring solution that scales effortlessly with your system is a prerequisite. The first requirement for monitoring environments that scale up and down is log centralization – getting your logs out of your systems and into a central location is critical if you want to keep your data after its source disappears.
Being able to visually organize logs from an elastic environment is another important component of on-demand scale. As new servers are added to your system, it’s important to be able to distinguish them from your other nodes rather than lumping everything together. Logentries not only enables you to collect logs from distributed systems but also empowers you to organize your logs in ways that make sense for auto-scaling environments.
Finally, having the freedom to monitor an elastic environment without fear of punishment for exceeding data limits is a necessity. Logging inherently involves fluctuating data volumes and, at times, unpredictable spikes. The concept of daily data limits when working with 3rd party monitoring tools can hinder your ability to effectively capture all of your data without penalty. An elastic logging service is one that adapts to data spikes without charging overage fees.
Real-time Analytics & Alerting
In an autoscaling environment, resources are constantly reallocated as demand changes. As new sources of data are introduced and eliminated, your monitoring tools will need to keep up, accurately identifying and tracking new data sources in real-time and storing data even after a source disappears. Only when your monitoring is real-time can you expect to achieve in-the-moment analytics and alerts for immediate access to your data.
Built for Containers
Microservice architectures and containerized environments are quickly becoming mainstream. Such ephemeral, scalable environments require a monitoring solution that aligns with microservice principles (by not requiring the installation of anything into each container) and can automatically account for new containers as they launch and old containers as they die. Logentries’ Docker Logging Container empowers you to implement a container monitoring solution as a container itself. When new containers are added to your environment, the Logentries container automatically identifies them and begins tracking logs and stats in real-time without requiring any further configuration.
A New Standard For Monitoring
Elastic Logging raises the bar for monitoring services to meet the same expectations you’d have for any auto-scaling production environment. By abiding by the same principles we apply to today’s most advanced distributed environments, Logentries’ Elastic Logging empowers you to log all of your data in any structure and be confident in your ability to monitor and analyze everything in real-time. To start your free, 30-day trial of Logentries, visit logentries.com/get-started.
