Application Logging in the 21st Century

By Tim Bunce
Date: Friday, 24 June 2016 12:10
Duration: 45 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: elasticsearch haproxy json kibana log4perl logstash rsyslog

You can find more information on the speaker's site:

• Talk: http://www.slideshare.net/Tim.Bunce/application-logging-in-the-21st-century-2014key

We run lots of applications on lots of machines. Many written in Perl but many not.

In this talk I'll be exploring how we've evolved the logging step by step to the point where we now capture, forward, and store all log messages from all applications on all machines into an Elasticsearch cluster. The powerful Kibana GUI makes searching fast, simple and powerful.

And not just applications logs as we also log all TCP and HTTP traffic as well, via haproxy.

Along the way we've learned many useful lessons and a few tricks.

For Perl applications in particular I'll be showing how we generate logs in JSON and automatically include extra 'contextual data' that make log messages much more useful. Got an uninitialized variable warning? Now you can see what the code was working on when that happened.