A modern logging solution

Eloquent

Article from ADMIN 77/2023

By Artur Skura

As systems grow more complex and distributed, managing and making sense of logs used for monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting can become a daunting task. Fluentd and its lighter counterpart Fluent Bit can help you unify data collection and consumption to make sense of logging data.

Fluentd is an open source data collector designed to simplify the process of log management. It serves as a unified logging layer that sits between your applications and various log outputs. Its primary function is to ingest logs from different sources, transform them as needed, and then send them to the appropriate destinations.

One of the key strengths of Fluentd is its flexibility. It can collect logs from a wide variety of sources, including logfiles, system logs, and network protocols. It can also output these logs to a similarly wide variety of destinations, including databases, cloud storage, and other log analysis tools.

In a typical system, logs might be produced in different formats and sent to different locations, which can make it difficult to aggregate and analyze the logs in a meaningful way. Fluentd solves this problem by providing a single, consistent interface for handling logs, making it much easier to aggregate and analyze them because they're all in one place and in a consistent format.

This approach has several benefits. First, it simplifies log management because you only need to interact with the unified logging layer, rather than with each log source individually. Second, it is easier to analyze your logs because they're all in a consistent format. Third, it is easier to ensure that all your logs are stored securely and reliably because the unified logging layer can handle things like buffering and retrying failed log transmissions. Moreover, Fluentd (and Fluent Bit) can apply various transformations along the way (e.g., anonymization). In this way the same data can be used for different purposes depending on the case – and with minimum friction.

In dynamic cloud settings, applications might produce logs spread over an array of virtual machines, serverless platforms, and various services. Fluentd and Fluent Bit stand out in these situations, helping centralize this dispersed data and providing a unified log

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