Know everything about Logging as a Service(LaaS)

The way any organisation may flourish depends to a large extent on the successful functioning of the applications and services that support the business aspects. Any kind of prolonged interruptions and downtime is of great concern today more than ever in terms of customer inconvenience and lost revenue.

Investing in a cloud logging tool not only helps in actively monitoring the working of applications and services but also swiftly resolves issues that are prominent to one’s organisation.  By providing data that can efficiently help you diagnose any problem it helps you to pinpoint the actual problem and debug it subsequently.

Logging is a scalable solution that can transform your log management program. Here are the reasons why you should consider LaaS.

What is Logging as a service (LaaS)?

Logging as a Service (LaaS) is a cloud logging tool that is SaaS-based. Logging as a service can help organizations in collecting, analysing and storing all their apps, system and cloud-based logs in a centralised server in the cloud. Along with the services like transmission and storage logs on a centralised server cloud logging vendors also aid in streamlining visualisation, alerting, search and analysis by providing an additional range of services. 

One of the unique features of LaaS is that it permits the users for the management and displays all relevant logs, all while producing log feeds and alerts for users from a unique centralized source that you can surf through at your will even before the ultimate disposal of those logs.

Why does any organisation need Logging as a service(LaaS)?

There are two traditional ways through which an IT team manages logs, one of which is either hiring log viewers who view system logs or accessing logs remotely by SSH into servers. However, by using these ways one can only find issues with a particular device. Over the years, these methods of troubleshooting have become irrelevant as systems now need far more efficient methods like distributed cloud-based resources that can manage logs more reliably. As a result, many teams are inclined towards cloud-based centralized servers for log management. Despite the availability of many open-source tools that help in setting up cloud-based logging, commercial LaaS providers on the other hand offer a range of advantages such as 

• A self-service portal that allows the users to set up a log aggregation without any significant configuration challenges. Regardless of the logs belonging to an on-premises system or cloud-based, cloud logging makes sure the secure collection of all your logs is in a centralised location.

• Commercial Laas providers are also known to increase the scalability of an organisation. The amount of work that goes into the creation, setting up and maintaining logging is tremendous that can distract an organisation from its real work. On top of it, creating scalable storage that is capable of meeting any increase in the log volume could be an issue. However, LaaS ensures none of your logs goes missing because of storage issues. Any log retention policies can be viewed and modified subsequently according to your storage needs.

• What otherwise would have been a struggle to offer quick results for queries with the growing volumes of logs, is now made easy by advanced features offered by the LaaS providers that allow the users to not only view your logs but also in getting quick search results.

How do Log Analysis Tools Work?

Log analysis can get quite tedious when done traditionally. Tools of log analysis can help in streamlining the process of converting raw and unstructured data to actionable insights that can in turn be used to enhance an application’s efficiency.

Traditionally collection of data across the network, aggregation of disparate log data into a single centralized location and extraction of actionable insights would have been very difficult for the techies since it’s a manual process and doesn’t involve any log management tools

However, by using log analysis tools the processing and storing of data in the cloud storage is a breeze now. These tools can potentially save hours for the organisations that they can invest in detecting issues in the application even before they become critical. These tools can be readily updated and improved upon the availability of advanced technology. Log analysing tools are a way to save an organisation’s resources that are otherwise invested on on-premises infrastructure and help them use the logging analytics information for better.

Selecting a logging service 

There are possibly numerous vendors available in the market currently who offer log management services that could range from basic to advanced (LogDNA, Splunk, Sumo Logic). While weighing your options, think of how big or small your organisation is. It is always advisable to opt for advanced solutions while setting up a  NOC or SOC in humongous organisations. These solutions also come with SIEM(Security Information & Event Management) features. However, these advanced solutions are not for novice organisations and users as they involve a high learning curve. 

Benefits of LaaS

• By using Laas you can bypass inaccessible logs which means you’re not kept from information that holds value to your organisation.

• It is easy to get lost among the various formatting layouts while dealing with logs however Logging as a Service makes this job easy by identifying the common layouts by taking relevant information and putting it out in a rather consistent manner that can help you analyse trends.

• LaaS can find out any key security anomalies and send an alert to the IT team allowing them to work on the issue even before they become critical.

• LaaS also comes with great credibility of not letting your log files fall into the wrong hands since the system can be accessed by a single user at a time. 

• Features like automatic backup and archives make sure the users can access their log of choice despite it not being available at the original source provided if you have the access to the system.

Conclusion 

Logs help you get a sense of the functioning and problems within a system. They also help in finding out the problems quickly allowing the users/organizations to act upon them quickly.

With the kind of logging services available in the current market, logging is a breeze. It is not only cost-effective that lets you keep a track of your platform’s performance but also sends quick alerts for you to act upon them quickly. 

This could potentially change the way you look at events that otherwise require manual intervention and saves tons of hours subsequently. LaaS is a kind of service your organisation can totally rely upon as it can be the core of your platform’s monitoring solutions and provides data to check through when things go wrong. Make sure you invest in a LaaS system that is well rounded.