At this point, you probably know how important the correct management of data can be to keep a company running smoothly. All businesses, no matter how small, rely on information to make important decisions and transform. Logging and monitoring tools can make it easier to understand the huge amounts of data that you collect from your networks and services on a regular basis.
They both give you a better insight into what’s happening in your organization and provide you with useful information that you can use to make decisions that are valuable to the bottom line of your business. However, while logging and monitoring both sound like very similar things, it’s important to remember that they have their differences. Here, we’re going to look at what logging and monitoring actually are, and why you need both.
What is Logging?
Logging with a software solution or Papertrail – cloud hosted log management tool is the process of managing all of the information produced by your network, applications, and infrastructure. The logging process can include everything from log aggregation, which involves taking information from different sources and moving them to a central location, to log archiving. With the right logging tools, you can control and manage the quality of your data by addressing missing logs and redundant information.
You can also ensure the security and privacy of the data that you’re collecting too, which is crucial for compliance purposes. The extent of your logging operation, and the advanced features that it includes, such as log analysis, log enrichment, and more, will depend on a number of things, including the kind of business that you’re running. Some companies naturally generate less information than others.
What is Monitoring?
So, if that’s logging, what is log monitoring? Essentially, it’s the art of ensuring that your application or content remains available and working reliable within the right amount of time. Monitoring can also involve things like reducing infrastructure costs or optimizing code goals too. Monitoring tools help you to achieve your business targets by monitoring metrics on how an application or service is responding in certain scenarios.
Application performance monitoring encompasses various approaches, techniques, and tools. For instance, you can use real user monitoring to assess the health of an application when it’s already available to the public. There’s also the option to explore synthetic monitoring, which uses synthesized interactions to monitor an application. Alternatively, network monitoring allows you to analyze the network traffic in your business as a method of tracking performance and availability in an application.
Do You Need Both?
Because of the various different tools available in the monitoring industry, it can often be difficult to determine exactly which software is right for you to begin with. Often, many companies prefer to opt for a cloud-based solution that combines logging and monitoring into the same place. This makes it easier to manage information and get useful insights from the data that you collect in your business at the same time. While both logging and monitoring have unique benefits to deliver, they often work best when they’re combined into a complete strategy for keeping your business and applications running in peak condition.