Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS)

Chapter 10

Creating a Centralized Logging Strategy

The problem with troubleshooting is trouble shoots back.

—Anonymous

Logging is a critical component of any cloud-based application. As we shift away from the old client-server architectures to cloud-based distributed architectures, managing systems becomes more complex. Many cloud-based systems are built to scale up and down on-demand. Under the covers, compute resources are automatically being provisioned and deprovisioned as workloads spike up and down. The dynamic nature of an elastic cloud application creates a need to separate the storing of logging information from the physical servers where the logs are created so that the information is not lost when the cloud resources go away.

This chapter will discuss the uses of log files and the requirements for building a centralized logging strategy.

Log File Uses

For those of us building highly distributed systems in the cloud, having a sound logging strategy is a critical component of building a secure and manageable solution. Log files have very useful information about the behavior of database activity, user access, error and debugging information, and much more. In a distributed environment where a company may have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers that make up its overall solution, finding data in logs is like finding a needle in a haystack without a centralized logging solution.

Log files have many uses. Here is a core list of uses of log files in most systems: ...