Why Actionable Logs Require Sufficient History

This blog was originally published Oct. 26, 2021 on humio.com. Humio is a CrowdStrike Company.

Improve visibility and increase insights by logging everything

ITOps, DevOps and SecOps teams need historical log data to ensure the security, performance and availability of IT systems and applications. Detailed historical log data is fundamental for understanding system behavior, mitigating security threats, troubleshooting problems and isolating service quality issues.

But when it comes to indexing, structuring, and maintaining log data, traditional log management solutions are notoriously inefficient and costly. Many businesses today simply can’t afford to gather and retain massive volumes of log data from all their networking gear, security products and other IT platforms using conventional log management solutions.

To make matters worse, many log management vendors use volume-based software licensing schemes that are prohibitively expensive for most businesses. For all these reasons, most organizations limit the types of log records they collect or periodically age out log data, leaving security and IT operations professionals in the dark.

So what can be done about it?

Comprehensive historical log data is fundamental for IT and security operations

Whether you work in DevOps, ITOps or SecOps, comprehensive historical log records are essential tools of the trade. They are critical for:

• Troubleshooting and root cause analysis. Historical data is fundamental for identifying IT infrastructure issues, pinpointing faults and resolving problems. By going back in time and analyzing detailed log records, you can correlate network and system issues with configuration changes, software upgrades or other adds, moves and changes that might have affected IT infrastructure and impacted applications.
• Mitigating security threats. Historical data is also fundamental for isolating security breaches and remediating threats. By examining access logs and investigating changes to firewall rules or other security settings, you can pinpoint attacks, take corrective actions and avoid extensive data loss or system downtime.
• Optimizing performance and service quality. Historical data is vital for identifying compute, storage and networking performance bottlenecks and for optimizing user experience. By analyzing detailed performance data from a variety of sources, development and operations teams can gain insights into design and implementation issues impairing application service quality or response time.

Log everything with Humio

Humio’s flexible, modern architecture improves the log management experience for organizations by transforming massive volumes of historical log data into meaningful and actionable insights, enabling complete observability to answer any question, explore threats and vulnerabilities, and gain valuable insights from all logs in real time. Many organizations still struggle with cost constraints dictating their log strategies, but unlike conventional log management systems, Humio cost-effectively ingests any amount of data at any throughput, providing the full visibility needed to identify, isolate and resolve the most complex issues. The TCO Estimator is a quick and easy way to see this value.

With Humio’s innovative index-free design, organizations are no longer forced to make difficult decisions about which data to log and how long to retain it. By logging everything, organizations gain the holistic insights needed to investigate and mitigate any issue.

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