>>Everyone knows that logs are important,
and they can also be a little bit of a pain.
>>Yeah, you have thousands upon thousands
of log messages coming from routers,
switches, firewalls, servers, a lot of your traditional
on-prem equipment.
But then we even have additional challenges today
with things like hybrid cloud, and full cloud deployment.
>>Exactly, and just getting at these logs
isn't necessarily easy.
You know you might have to open up a terminal,
find the right directory, start tailing that log,
grap through some things to try and find the
right pieces of information you're looking for.
And that's just one one of potentially thousands
of different logs.
>>Right so kinda the key is to have a nice central place
to aggregate all that data and take a look at it.
Potentially even to be able to filter and search and alert
off the messages coming in.
Right alongside your other performance data.
>>Absolutely. And so I think today we're gonna be
talking about two of SolarWinds' log solutions.
Log Analyzer and Loggly.
>>Right. So Log Analyzer, especially for a lot of
our existing customers that already have
on-prem SolarWinds deployments,
using things like NPM and SAM
to look at their environment.
They can look at those logs right alongside
the other performance metrics.
>>Awesome, awesome. Yeah and then
from my perspective, I'll be talking about Loggly
which is entirely SaaS-based
so it will really does excel both,
it can obviously collect on-premise logs but
it really excels for like cloud-based logs that
maybe otherwise difficult to collect.
>>Right. So why don't we take a look at
I can bring up our Log Analyzer tool
and take a look at some of that stuff here.
>>Awesome lets jump in.
>>Yeah so let me hop into our system here
and I'll show you a little bit of how we'll do this.
In kinda the SolarWinds Orion platform.
So we already have Log Analyzer installed in this system,
collecting logs from various servers and network devices
So this particular server, for example
has been having some issues with SQL
So I can come in here and go to this Analyze Logs button
for example, directly from this node
and here I have an interactive dashboard
that shows me the log messages from this particular device.
You'll notice these tags over here.
So these are some built in tags
that we ship out of the box with Windows Security
User Log In, things like that
>>Now, can you manually define your own tags as well?
>>Yeah so you can create your own tags
based off of various criteria.
There's obviously different color-coding
as you can see here.
So creating a tag to, for your common things
maybe, you know environment failure if it's network device
or maybe other system failures for servers.
But certainly you can create your own tags.
And then you can filter off of those as well.
So for example we see some SQL server issues here.
We actually had an unexpected server shut down
along with some memory issues on this particular device.
>>Now when you see a certain event like that
would you be able to like fire off an alert?
>>Yeah, so it the Log Analyzer product uses
the same alerting suite that we have within
the rest of the Orion platform.
So you have the ability to shoot off an email,
open up an incident for example in service now,
so you have numerous different actions you could take.
Run a script, all those kinda things are available to you.
So the other thing I really like to do is
in addition to just kind of looking at the logs here,
um I'm gonna go back a page,
we can go right back to the node we came in from,
and from the node, instead of going into the Analyze Log
this time,
I'm going to use our Performance Analyzer PERFSTACK.
So PERFSTACK allows us to take
virtually any metric we're collecting in the system,
and visualize it here on this type of chart.
>>Oh wow.
>>So we have a lot of out of the box CPU memory,
response time type alerts already on here
I'm gonna add in some of the same logs
we were looking at a moment ago.
So if I go click on the entity over here,
and I will grab some of our log events.
So now I can see these Window events
directly alongside all of our performance data.
So I might see you know a spike in CPU
or memory after a log event for example.
Or maybe a system down,
but then I can actually drag over to this time period
and zoom in.
>>Wow, that's pretty easy.
>>Yeah so now once I'm zoomed in,
I can see over here on the left
in our what we call our Data Explorer,
all those entries in that time period
and then I even have my filtering here.
So if I wanted to kinda get little bit more granual
and look for specific messages I could,
and see what was going on around this time period.
So makes it really easy to see the log entries
right alongside all your other performance data.
>>Yeah really good down to the kinda
root cause type analysis.
>>Right, yeah, and like we were talking earlier
with an alert, like if I find that one of these entries
may have been the originator of the problem I'm having,
I might wanna trigger an alert like remediated advance,
potentially before I have an outage.
Or at least get my down time reduced
by catching the issue quicker.
>>Wow. That all looks great with Log Analyzer.
I think we can show you something
really similar with Loggly.
You mind if I step in?
>>Sure, absolutely.
>>So here we're looking at Loggly's main page
and essentially what you'll see is all the events
coming in from all of your different sources in one place.
We make it easy to search between those different sources
using the Field Explorer here on the left hand side.
>>Okay.
>>So one of the things we talked about earlier was
a hybrid or a an entirely cloud-based infrastructure
that you might be working with.
So, the example we're gonna use today
is our AWS CloudWatch metrics
that we're able to collect.
Um, lets just drill right in to the Field Explorer here.
And look for our particular metric name,
that we may be trying to collect from.
>>Okay.
>>So as we expand this out a little bit,
we can see we collect a lot of different metrics here.
And we'll just click on one at random.
CPU Utilization, this one should be familiar enough
for everybody.
What that's gonna do is apply a filter to the logs
and now we're looking at events that only pertain
to this particular metric.
>>Okay.
>>And you see we have a large number of those
but turning this into something more usable,
is pretty easy.
We'll just turn it into a chart quickly.
So clicking on Chart here,
all we have to do is change the value type to a statistic,
and then we can look at a particular numeric.
In this case, we'll look at the
average of the CPU utilizations over time.
>>All right.
>>So now we have this nice chart here
that's gonna show how CPU is performing throughout time
and then adding it to our chart library
and by extension creating a dashboard off of it,
it's just easiest clicking this Edit Chart button.
I'll show a completed dashboard quickly
just to get an idea what this might look like,
and show it side by side
with some more traditional log-type data.
So here we can see we've got our CPU utilization
we were just talking about.
Maybe some network stats down at the bottom
even the ELB Latency.
So from a couple of different sources
around our AWS environment.
You can also see that we have
just our standard Syslog Severity porting in,
so if there's any correlate, hm?
>>Can you filter any of those out?
>>Yeah, absolutely, so all these charts are live,
all you have to do is
click on any of the data points in the key,
and it'll automatically update the chart for you.
So one other thing that I will mention is
that we have the ability to create an alert as well.
So if we wanted to, we could come in here,
generate an alert based off of this data.
So if our CPU utilization passed a certain point,
we'd be able to alert on that.
>>Or any other string of text?
>>Any other string of text, exactly.
Yeah, so that's basically Loggly.
>>So to me it seems that if you're use case is primarily
cloud-based applications, AWS, this SaaS solution,
that Loggly be a good fit for those type of users.
>>You know, Log Analyzer is a great addition
to an existing Orion deployment, really high performance
for large volumes of logs and can bring all that
data together.
>>Yeah, and if someone wants to try out the Log Analyzer,
they can just go to support.solarwinds.com
and find out more about the product.
>>Yeah, similarly if you just go to Loggly.com,
you can see and we even have a free trial available
so you can give it a shot.
>>So, you know logs aren't going away,
they're a part of every IT pro's job,
so having the right tool to help kinda
parse through that data is a necessary atom for most of us.
>>Yeah, absolutely. It really makes a higher degree
of analysis possible,
And takes away a lot of that heavy lifting
of going through logs.
>>Awesome.