#GlueCon 2014 Notes: Love your Logs with Elasticsearch ELK – Jordan Sissel, Elasticsearch

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Love your Logs with Elasticsearch ELK – Jordan Sissel, Elasticsearch

  • Been in operations for 10 years, recently switched to programming but always been one
  • What is a log? Time + Data
  • Logs come with a scale problem – we can read a few lines, but can’t consume lots of them at once
  • We got here because of printf
  • Complex logging rules that make things look pretty to humans break analytics (and add more complexity to a simple printf) (cough MySQL)
  • Structured logs, such as JSON, makes it easier to capture logs, parse with one line and no regex, and then analyze
  • Just use a standard time format (e.g. ISO8601)
  • ELK is 3 open source apps: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana
  • “If a new user has a bad time, it’s a bug”
  • Processing and Transport – a universal glue that connects inputs to outputs with filtering along the way
  • Graph everything and look for shapes to find anomalies
  • Use tools that allow you to explore those anomalies to find the root cause