Logging: Unsexy, Important, and now Usable. | Hacker News Reader

Logging: Unsexy, Important, and now Usable.

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24 pointsgsteph2228 comments

"We want to be like Geordi in Star Trek, who can see everything on the Enterprise with a few finger presses. I wish there was such a thing! The closest we can get is ganglia, which monitors OS-level events (it can be hacked for apps)."

I disagree. Large software companies already exist in this space: Splunk, LogLogic, Arcsight, etc. The author Sounds like they reinvented Splunk in particular. (disclaimer: I work for Splunk and can see everything in your datacenter with a few finger presses. Call me Geordi LaForge.)

I hope it's not as painful as Geordi's visor.

The client app is called BananaClip.

Hi I work in the log importation services business.

From my perspective the main hurdle to log aggregation/correlation is not scalability. If splunk doesn't cut it for your performance needs, you have probably hit the price point to where you can afford a loglogic or similar appliance.

Instead the barrier to entry is in the number of applications supported by a particular log archival product, and the ability to correlate across the different applications.

As I'm sure you know at this point, adding support for log types is a painstaking task. Most vendors punt on this and tell customers to do it themselves.

If there is a niche available to you as a startup I would think that it would be in offering a very low turnaround time in supporting new log types. For example: give us some log sources and we'll support and categorize your logs with our service.

As for running in the cloud on large datasets, I think you'll find that most customers are not going to want to double or triple their outgoing bandwidth -- In addition to concerns from a security compliance standpoint.

That being said, good luck in your venture. Logging is a mess, and could certainly use some clean up. :)

For 99% of all companies a simple unix box that collects log files and moves them along for permanent storage a few days later (S3/Tape) is enough. At Shopify we use Clarity which is a web frontend for Grep and Tail that we released as open source: http://github.com/tobi/clarity

FTA: This means in order to find what you want, you need to explore the data: you need to search it. The only tool most of us can use is grep

Um... what? Have the authors gotten stuck in a time vortex and been dropped off before, y'know, awk? Much less perl, or any of those new-fangled toys.

I mean: writing scripts to do log analysis is a pretty fundamental problem for server-side development, and lots of very smart people have spend the last two^H^H^Hthree decades working on tools to address the issue.

I don't even see how this (indexing the entries across a Hadoop cluster) is all that useful. In general, you don't do log analysis by asking "give me all the entries that match this pattern", you do it by walking them in order and extracting one or two fields from each line and building some kind of result data structure. This thing would be fine if you were asking for all the logs messages that mentioned "coffee", I guess. But what if you wanted a histogram of hit counts per page per day-of-week?

Thanks for providing this valuable perspective. I sort of group grep/Perl scripts/everything else together as manual processes. What I was getting at is the whole "roll your own" scripts is a royal pain in the ass.

For analytics, you're right, search is only part of the equation. That's why we make MapReduce easy to use on a cluster. You can write Pig or Hive scr

We also have templates for common data formats (and ways to roll your own) so you can turn unstructured log text into structured data, so that a histogram of hit counts per day-of-week is just a few lines of a script (or maybe even a search).

Looks like I got cut off in the middle. *You can write Pig or Hive scripts to generate interesting analytics.

Out of curiosity, can you be more specific on what scalability, analytics, and ease-of-use improvements LogSearch offers vs. Splunk in particular? We use Splunk internally and have not found it to be significantly lacking in these areas but are always open to alternatives. Additionally, what is the advantage of relegating log management to a cloud application? Typically log data is relatively sensitive; do you provide assurances that the data won't be misused, lost, repurposed, etc.?

Thanks! Actually our software runs in the cloud or in your datacenter. If it's in the cloud, it can be encrypted in trasmission (or stored encrypted if you're willing to take the performance hit).

If it's sensitive data, I'd recommend just spinning up your own cluster and installing the tool.

Oh, and as far as scale-wise: we run on the "web scale", which means a dozen to hundreds or more of computers, each generating tons of logs. It's why we're built on Hadoop. It's the main complaint our customer research indicated people have with tools like Splunk.

Cool. Splunk also does this and it's good to know that people don't perceive Splunk to be capable of operating this way so we can fix this perception.

Or you can use a tool that has already scaled for ages and has been in production since 2002. SenSage ... http://www.sensage.com/customers.

Also not wanting to sound like a mouthpiece, but choice of log management system is a very interesting topic to me... scalability is only one concern and may not trump everything. We actually looked at both LogLogic and Sensage during our initial evaluation both of which scaled better than Splunk did at the time. My memory of the evaluations is dim (2+ years ago), but I recall that both products seemed more brittle in our environment (education), where we have very little control over incoming log formats due to somewhat chaotic organizational structure and infrastructure. Splunk seemed more able to accept unstructured or unexpected data without complaint and to deal with the parsing at search time rather than index time, and was a more natural fit. The other decision points/tradeoffs we ended up making were a) no additional licensing cost for Splunk agents, b) prioritization of real-time perusal for troubleshooting purposes over long-term reporting and canned reports. Sensage excels at the latter since it amortizes the cost of reporting by caching periodic results, and provides a large set of prebuilt reports, if I recall correctly. Splunk's "summary indexing" serves sort of the same purpose as the cachign feature of Sensage and has been improved in v4.0. And c) no additional cost for users (we have over 50 people looking at data indexed by Splunk). The "search" metaphor is also very easy for people to grasp which was an added benefit of the Splunk GUI.

My sense has been that at least the low end of the market is increasingly preferring a search-oriented log management architecture versus a database-backed, query-heavy architecture because organizations are familiar with the search metaphor, the overhead of managing a search index is less than the cost of database administration, and the unsophisticated use case (i.e., free-text search rather than advanced query syntax) is increasingly common. Smaller organizations also rarely have the maturity to deal with logging systematically since it requires a pretty systematic approach to infrastructure. That said, the tradeoffs we made may or may not apply in a terabytes-per-day environment, I unfortunately can't speak to it directly.

To corroborate this, it has not been our experience that Splunk doesn't scale. We have a ~40GB/day environment and according to support can scale that to ~100GB/day on a single quad-core server with SAN back-end, license permitting. The lag between reception and indexing is negligible; we actually have some developers looking at their own debug logs in it.

Unfortunately, I don't work in a TB/day environment (though that would be fun), so I can't comment on that directly, but our experience with Splunk has been positive at this scale and I see no reason so far why a distributed installation with multiple 100GB/day nodes would change that. The only customer complaints we have are basically that long-term searches don't return instantly, and that's primarily a factor of I/O speed and can be resolved by setting up summary indexing (which requires forethought about what data you're interested in... therefore, it very rarely happens in my organization).

Thanks for the additional context... like one of the other posters mentioned, I think once your target organization has evolved beyond the capabilities of the existing products in this space, the knowledge and analytics built-in to the product become the product differentiator. Scalability is assumed. For known problems, the real value of a log analysis tool is in the knowledgebase you buy with the product and the canned reports you can get out of it; that's why there are specialized SIM/SIEM products out there. If it is an unknown problem, your customer will end up generating the knowledge base themselves anyway. Unfortunately, many of your customers may not even know what their problems are, and will expect you to sell them an "Easy button" solution...

All that said, good luck in your endeavors!

The main thing is: we focus on bringing a cost and performance advantage to the small and medium companies, to make their lives a little better.

It's true that LogSearch is similar, but we focus on cloud, analytics, ease-of-use and scalability -- each of which we'ce heard Splunk lacks.

I don't mean to come off sounding like a mouthpiece for Splunk, but Splunk does work with "cloud" data (hurray for buzz words), it is dead simple to use out of the box and recognizes many special fields like timestamps without any configuration (and also provides extensive configurability when needed) and scales like the distributed monster it is, capable of handling 10-15 MB of data / sec. on a single machines and GBs worth of data per day when scaled out across multiple machines. You should try it before you judge it on hearsay (and I'll maintain that you should also try any Splunk competitor before judging them as well).

We have tried them :) And so have several of our customers.

I have tried Splunk. It's a great concept and I commend the Splunk team for building such an easy to use, polished product. However we found the query performance to be... ahem... not well geared towards large data sets. This combined with the licensing model meant it wasn't an option for us.

I just wish Yahoo would open source Everest (their multi-PB column store DB based on PostgreSQL) -- this would be ideal for building an open source Splunk competitor.

Interesting. Do you know which version of Splunk you were using? Our latest version has vastly improved our query performance over large datasets.

Re. an open source log indexer: Agree, this is a space that will eventually become dominated by open source tools, used particularly by startups and small businesses. I think most people ignore this use of a MapReduce-like framework because they conceptually understand how it could be used, but 99% of all work is in the implementation, not the idea. And as of yet, I don't believe there has been a specific implementation beyond what companies like Shopify are doing where they add nice GUI tools on top of awk and grep (which admittedly is probably good enough for most people / business on this forum).

Yes, Everest is cool stuff.

If you have huge datasets, we'd love to hear from you. If even to chat for a few minutes about what your data looks like. Ping me at info@drawntoscale.com -- maybe we can help!

For scalability use SenSage (http://www.sensage.com/customers). Their some of their customers gather 200GB-500GB of log data daily and at least one customer has a petabyte of historical log data under management. Query performance over long time ranges is important ... when you discover a new exploit in use, how can you tell how long it's been employed unless you can look at history?

I miss spoke. Splunk handles multiple TBs per day easily in a distributed environment.

I worry, like the other posters, that cloud logging + search is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

It's not only the cloud, it's also in the datacenter :)

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