Logentries - Multi-platform Centralized Logging

Background:

Many times we develop websites that receive a request and perform multiple operations, including using other services which are not located under the same website.

The problem:

When we analyze error causes and unexpected results we need to track the flow from the request send, through the different processing stages up to the point where the response is received.

This requires the inspection of the different logs of the various system components.

We wanted to have a centralized logging where we could see the different logs in one location.

The problem was that the system components are in different platforms and languages (Windows/Linux, JS/.Net/C++).

We already use Kibana as a centralized logging for our in-house applications but here we have a website that is accessed from all over the world and logging data to the Kibana requires the exposure of an external endpoint.

The solution:

We chose to use Logentries.com site where log data from any environment is centralized and stored in the cloud. One can then search and monitor it.

It is very easy to use and provides two ways to achieve this; either by combining libraries directly in the application (e.g Javascript, .Net log4net Appender) or by adding an agent that listens to the application log file and sends it to the centralized logging site.

Logentries has simple and user-friendly UI with some useful features such as Aggregated Live-Tail Search, Custom Tags, Context View, Graphs.

This solution certainly meets our requirements.