Logs began with UNIX in the 1960s, partly to preserve the culture of close communication in programming. Luckily, that culture has held fast as programming and technology have taken many different shapes and evolutions over the years, and today, the idea behind logs is still to maintain data for correlation and analysis to meet enterprise security and compliance needs.

DevOps is the new normal, and cloud here is to stay – sound familiar? When you combine the two and distill the technology at the core, what you end up with is the realization of the importance of logs and log management. This is because logs at multiple levels help DevOps teams understand their application and even allow them to detect and address application issues before being promoted into production.

Log management is the answer to all of your digital transformation woes. No, hear me out. At its heart, log management is the (challenging) task of collecting and storing all machine-generated data from across your entire enterprise into a common repository. If this collection doesn’t happen, or if log collection is limited to certain datasets, there’s little chance of deriving those high value insights you dream of.