You may need to commit more effort and resources to ensure that your IT infrastructure is appropriately monitored and protected as it becomes more extensive, more dispersed, and more complicated. Log management includes log monitoring and analysis that is one major approach to keep an eye on the health of your infrastructure.
Data from log analysis may help you analyze patterns and trends in infrastructure activity, uncover potentially dangerous abnormalities, and fix performance problems with particular apps. If you want to stay compliant with different security standards and requirements, you’ll need to monitor, analyze, and archive logs regularly. Overall, by implementing log management and analysis tools into your security processes, you may maximize the advantages of log data analysis.
Four main benefits of log management:
Better Business Processes
Since many departments depend on IT resources to perform business-essential operations, log analysis tools help identify key system issues or patterns and resolve them immediately. Log analyzers also help maintain SLAs between IT teams and other departments or customers, which reduces service interruptions and downtime by adopting a proactive approach to issue identification and troubleshooting.
Improved root cause analysis
Log data helps identify the primary cause when an application has issues. The whole stack trace is usually captured in the application’s error log when the system throws an exception. This data allows engineers to track down the problematic method calls and pinpoint the particular line of code that caused the problem, making the issue more straightforward to study and recreate. A successful incident response approach includes efficient root cause analysis so that respondents can comprehend the issue and find a lasting solution. In this way, log data helps reduce another important incident response metric: Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). Similarly, lowering MTTR minimizes the effect of accidents on end-users. Moreover, developers can spend more time creating new and exciting features, increasing the product’s value to the consumer.
To stay compliant
Aside from internal rules, many companies are legally compelled to follow data legislation and security standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, or GDPR. Through advanced filtering and masking capabilities, the right log management tool can help you meet regulatory criteria by rewriting and masking sensitive information in logs, ensuring that customer data is retained securely, and that access to sensitive data is restricted to only those who are permitted to view it. Moreover, detailed event log files act as the single source of truth on whether your software and interdependent applications and services are secure and what type of data they have access to. You can constantly monitor your progress toward these goals with a log management tool.
Application Usage Analysis
While log data is helpful for troubleshooting inconsistencies, log management has other benefits. For example, developers may utilize log data to fully understand how consumers interact with an app. A web application’s request logs may show vital organizational trends and patterns, such as when a web application receives the most traffic. Audit logging allows evaluating user behaviors inside an application for security reasons. A system’s audit log generally records login and logout activities and when and how someone manipulates data inside the system. Organizations now have a tool for discovering, tracing, and (possibly) reversing unauthorized data modifications, which offers them a substantial edge. In other words, businesses can use this method to strengthen security and reduce harm in the event of an incident.
Conclusion
Many modern IT infrastructures have data scattered across several systems and servers. Apica enables you to manage and analyze all of your system’s log messages from a single, centralized location. You can monitor your complete stack and dig down to particular files and issues with a single dashboard, enabling you to keep track of application performance and system behavior to discover unexpected activity instantly. Apica’s seamless integration provides a complete solution for real-time and historical log management, from server log analysis to resource metrics monitoring.
