Mining your log files with the ELK Stack Instruct video available to view

This session was recorded at Instruct on 1 August 2018 at Kaleidocode's offices in Durban.

Log files hold a vault of useful information for operations as well as business. Processing your log files could reveal a host of useful information:

• Who uses that brand new web solution you have just deployed?
• Which country are they in?
• What device are they using?
• When your host is under load, what else is happening in the environment?
• That pesky, intermittent error is back! How do you find it?
• Our build server is slow, why?

Processing application and server log files used to be such a chore. Getting a unified view of all logs required wizard-like skills! But over the past few years simple and easy solutions have emerged. Best of all, they’re free. That’s right, they’re all open source!

Join Chris for a hands-on presentation, where we’ll pull some useful open source Docker containers and set to work making them weave some magic on our log files.

Chris covers some Docker Compose basics to get you started with a simple ELK stack (Elastic Search, Log Stash and Kibana), configure some endpoints and setup log shipping (for Linux and Windows) so that we can process log files.

He will have you processing logs, and then looking at ways to transform and embellish your log data to add IT operational, as well as business value. Using your transformed data, he also covers visualising the data using Kibana.

To close out he will have you considering alternative technologies such as Prometheus and Grafana, and discuss the pros and cons of the different technologies. Mining log files has never been so simple. Watch this session to see how easy it is to get started.