Logging and monitoring can often be misconstrued as two words for the same thing. After all, if you’re logging or monitoring data in your applications and networks, then you’re in the process of collecting information for important purposes. You might be using a cloud application to examine something like web page load speed – Pingdom and user experience, or you may be storing information for the purpose of compliance. However, although both logging and monitoring concentrate on giving you more of the information that you need from your tools and applications, there is a difference between them. While monitoring helps you to manage your application’s performance, logging is all about managing the data that you collect from that performance.
The Difference Between Monitoring and Logging
While monitoring is valuable because it shows you that your applications are working as they should be, logging is essential in helping you to get to the bottom of problems with your applications. The two tools are closely related, because this data is essential for application monitoring. Without effective logging, you simply can’t do monitoring effectively. While you can use separate tools for both strategies, many companies find that it’s a lot easier to use a combined system for both logging and monitoring at the same time. This makes troubleshooting critical issues much simpler and faster, because you can do it through the same platform. Just remember, while logging is vital to the support of performance monitoring strategies, that isn’t its only purpose. Logging is also there to help you respond better to security incidents and data breaches.
The right logs can also ensure that your compliant with the latest security regulations, policies and audits, so that you don’t fall behind in your industry. What’s more, you can use this to find out what users are doing with your tools and understand their online behavior. For instance, if you notice that your web load speed is correlating with a larger number of people hitting the back button on your website, you’ll know that you need to improve speed to boost your conversions.
Why You Need Both Tools
Without well-managed logs that make data from across your entire network or digital environment available to application monitoring services, you’re lacking an essential source of data for making crucial business decisions. You’ll also be more likely to run into other problems too, such as a risk of non-compliance because you’re failing to log your auditing data effectively. Without monitoring, you can’t make sense of the data that you are collecting on a regular basis and use it to understand how you can effectively make your business grow. Nor will you be able to understand where problems often come from and prevent those issues from recurring over time.
In an ideal world, you need a tool that can bring all of your data and insights together in the same environment and aggregate that information into something actionable that you can use to build a brighter future. An all-in-one cloud service will bring logs and metrics together to give you everything you need for reduced downtimes and increased application performance.