Centralized logging

In a corporate setting, it is typical to centralize logs. This makes it easier to connect the dots when debugging issues. It also means that in a distributed application, not every log on each physical or virtual machine or container has to be looked at individually. These centralized logging services typically make it easy and fast to query large amounts of logs, especially when the company uses structured logging and services adhere to a uniform log structure.

These logging services are either their own products, such as rsyslog, Loki, the ELK stack (Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana), and Graylog, or they are managed services. These can, for example, be the hosted variants of the services we just mentioned or cloud-specific logging solutions, such as Google’s operations suite (formerly known as Stackdriver), AWS CloudWatch, or Azure Monitor. There are many similarities between these systems in that they provide mechanisms to “ship”...