Log Data Analysis

Archive Log Files Oracle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s going to be more and more pain for the IT  Companies. These companies are taking clients for a ride on resources, with rates that are way too high compared to the skill levels offered.

Ramesh told sudama about looking out for options. Because competition has increased not just from the  Indian Biggies but also from a new breed of ambitious service providers from around the world.

Now new breed of companies started offering services like “software as a services” (SaaS) or “platform as a service” (PaaS, where hardware or storage can be rented over the internet).

TOUGH TIMES

“Think over it,  today clients are demanding new pricing models, cheaper is what they expect, a presence across geographies and greater sharing of risk from you.”

“Its new timeline, It will be now more aligned to value creation, rather than just mere IT Development“…

Value is important…
“Annual contracts are being renegotiated regularly, on a term. ”

Sudama looks at the various methods taken up by the Administrators in managing the server log.

It becomes an impossible task to manually keep track of all log data generated and maintain the security of the server

 IT administrators provide access to log files in the following methods.

Manual copy

• Since IT administrators have direct access to production machines, log files are downloaded and sent to the development team via e-mail or keeping in a shared drive/folder.
• This is a tedious process as IT administrators need to spend a lot of time in this method. Since the application might be running on multiple instances, manual copy would consume more time.
• Live log access is a limitation in this method.
• In the modern IT infrastructure, the teams may be located across the globe. Since the bandwidth varies from location to location, the copy and download process would take a lot of time.

Automatic Copy by a script

• Some IT administrators come-up with intelligent UNIX shell scripts that moves the log files into a shared drive/folder. This process occurs at regular intervals.
• In order to write the diligent script, IT admin requires adequate programming skills related to the operating system.
• Even this method doesn’t support live log access.

  

  JBoss application server (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Configure SAN/NAS for log file storage

• SAN/NAS storage devices will be integrated with production machines and mapped to a folder name. The IT admin configures the application servers log file location to the SAN/NAS drives. The development team would require to map the SAN/NAS drive to their local machines.
• This method is not feasible as configuring SAN/NAS devices are expensive.
• Storing log files in SAN/NAS devices is not a viable option as it’s a single point of a failure. Due to the hiccups in the network or NAS/SAN devices, log content will not be stored in the devices. This leads to the application server failure as it stops the entire logging frame work and all the threads get stuck, eventually this results the application outage.
• Though the log files are up to date, the development team by default do not have a console/tool/utility to view the live logs.

  

  Cloud computing stack showing infrastructure, platform and application layers as well as clients and servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)