Back-end Performance

Chapter 8: How to Process Server Logs

by Daniel Berman

When things go south with our applications — as they sometimes do, whether we like it or not — our log files are normally among the first places where we go when we start the troubleshooting process. The big “but” here is that despite the fact that log files contain a wealth of helpful information about events, they are usually extremely difficult to decipher.

A modern web application environment consists of multiple log sources, which collectively output thousands of log lines written in unintelligible machine language. If you, for example, have a LAMP stack set up, then you have PHP, Apache, and MySQL logs to go through. Add system and environment logs into the fray — together with framework-specific ...