Data Operations Tool : Logmatic.io features and review
Searching for an intelligent Operations Data Platform? Here we are taking a look at Logmatic.io, a cloud based solution for log analyzing, pattern generation, events management and a lot more. Read our article to see what all features come with this tool and if it fulfills the requirements of your project.
We live in an age where digital data is everything. It happens barely 1 day in a month when I actually pick a pen to write something. All my work is either on my computer or on my mobile. The same thing is being nowadays done by not only me but by other people as well as by small and big organizations too. This has also given rise to the field of data analytics where such data is used by commercial organizations for advertisement and marketing purposes, by law enforcement agencies to track financial irregularities as well as by engineers and data administrators for debugging and mining data related to bug patterns, customer usage tracking and much more. Here we are going to look at Logmatic.io, an online tool which can be used by data administrators and engineers for the tasks mentioned later in the above sentence.
Introduction
Logmatic.io is a cloud based solution being used by small to large businesses for collecting logs and events of their individual solutions to help them in debugging bugs, find patterns and give them insight into their customer requirements automatically.Features
Easily scalable
I have tried using Logmatic.io on my personal Ubuntu computer as well as the storage servers I professionally work on. On both the systems deploying and using the tool was a breeze. Even if you are a very big organization with many departments, Logmatic.io can easily handle the log analysis and storage for your organization with the admin having the option to restrict the access to logs to the responsible person only. This provides you with a very powerful tool to analyze your systems on a whole and still offers you the simplicity of granular debugging through logs. Check out the video below to see how granularly you can look at the logs of events that happened at a particular time and take corrective actions.Ship logs using a variety of ways
You have a host of options to choose how you want to ship your logs. You can configure Rsyslog from a Linux machine or RXlog from a Windows machine, you can use Syslog-ng, Logstash, Fluentd or you can directly do it from your source code or the Webservers you use.Advanced search
You can apply filters on the real-time time data getting updated on your dashboard to specifically target your area of interest. You can do full text searches, keyword based searches, granular event level logs searches, fuzzy search or complex search queries by combining one or more filters.Integration with Business application platforms through RESTful APIs
Using the RESTful APIs of Logmatic.io you can utilize the collected data by Logmatic.io through any Business Intelligence platform. This includes your own business apps or any third party service you might be using.Invaluable Analytics data
The logs and customer usage data collected by the tool will give you highly invaluable insights for your product development and allow you to do targeted innovations rather than depending on guesswork to decide the future scopes of improvement. The patterns occurring across your platform will be visible in correlated format making business decisions much more easier.Enrichment and Parsing
The raw and heterogeneous data collected through various means like user agent parsing and integrated IP geolocation is analyzed by Logmatic.io with Grok to give you a structured data with metrics and graphical representations. It can correlate data cutting across the different levels of your technology stack by dynamic tagging and custom parsing defined by yourself.Intelligent Events and logs Parsing
Using Grok, Logmatic.io can recognize events from Nginx, Apache, Firewalls, Syslogs, key/value patterns, JSON events, etc by using well recognized parsing standards. It can also identify the OS, browser, device as well as the user location using IP tagging. All this structured or unstructured data and logs are parsed and analyzed to give you easily comprehensible and structured data. You can run tests, deploy builds and more, directly from the user interface of Logmatic.io. To get the best analytics out of the dashboard it is suggested that you follow the best logging practices available to make parsing accurate and your work simple.Set Immediate alerts
Get alerts on your dashboards for events you define using search terms or some metric threshold. You can even set Logmatic.io to deliver alerts on mail or using some tool like PagerDuty, Slackor, HipChat or Webhooks.Get maximum value from your Access logs
Apache access logs or Nginx access logs provide you with a trove of information about your website performance and help you get the best from your website. You might be using Google Analytics for this purpose but the data provided there is not as granular as a web development team would like. Logmatic.io can analyze even the technical Apache or Nginx logs inside your tech systems and give you information that can have positive effects for the whole wide organization that existing tool like Google Analytics can't provide. Using it you can get Real-time product feedback, track/debug errors and broken links and monitor and fine tune the response time of your website.Wrap up
Logmatic.io is not a tool for which you need to go for some extensive training. Any technical person already working on the project can easily understand the data available on the dashboard. It can be configured too with quite an ease whether by an administrator or even by a team member. The structured data is provided in various formats for easy consumption like pie charts, graphs, sums, averages, percentages, geo maps, flow charts and time series. It provides you access to very detailed as well as to highly granular level of data. It can reduce your debugging time quite considerable and will help you prevent escalations and ensure customer delight. The pricing of the product is quite reasonable and before you buy its subscription you can make use of the 2 weeks trial period to see if it suits your needs or not.