How the New Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer Streamlines Log Analysis and Fundamentally Changes How DevOps Solves Operational Issues

After months of hard work and weeks of positive feedback from early adopter customers, I am thrilled that Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer^TM is available to all Loggly customers. Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer is a new, real-time log management user experience that fundamentally changes how developers and DevOps teams perform log analysis and operational troubleshooting.

Operational issues, whether full-blown fires or elusive performance problems, are a significant but often hidden cost of doing business in the cloud or over the web. DevOps professionals have told us that the majority of time spent SOLVING these operational issues is spent FINDING their root cause. This is tedious, often manual work that creates a huge drain on valuable engineering resources because it’s often not obvious where to start looking for a problem. Engineers have to perform query after query until they hit upon a clue.

There’s a Better Way

Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer offers an entirely new way to approach log data. Your troubleshooting never begins with a blank search page. Instead, you have real-time, navigable summaries of your logs with:

• Visibility into the inherent structure of all parsed logs
• All identified field names
• The frequency of individual values

 It’s like a map of your data, showing you both the most common events and the anomalies, as well as providing a quick and precise way to hone in on specific logs and filter out the “noise”.  As you continue to refine what you are looking for, Loggly Dynamic Fields^TM are always constantly refreshing, to provide relevant insights into the data you are viewing right now.

Search Less and Find More 

While search is ideal for when you have a good idea of what you are looking for, Dynamic Field Explorer allows you to quickly hone in on what’s relevant even when you don’t know where to look. That’s what makes it so much more effective than search alone.

For example, imagine that you’ve been alerted that a component of your web application is misbehaving. You are not sure exactly what’s wrong. You could do a series of searches in hopes of coming across relevant information, or you could instead use Dynamic Field Explorer to quickly traverse a navigable summary of your logs created in real-time.  At a glance, you would see a summary of the different kinds of exceptions that are currently occurring and the frequency of these exceptions between desktop vs mobile or across different browsers.  It’s this instant and continually customized overview that is new and different. It allows you to get a much fuller view of your logs and to more quickly zero in on what’s important.

This unique, real-time exploration of your log data is only possible with Loggly because of our Dynamic Fields technology, which has been a key differentiator since we originally launched Gen2 last year.  Since Loggly automatically parses your log data as it’s received without requiring you to set up rules beforehand, it has a rich term-by-term index at all times. The time-consuming work of cataloging your log data is done long before users need it, allowing Dynamic Fields to analyze your logs in real-time and quickly summarize all identified field data to present in the Dynamic Field Explorer. 

Want to See Dynamic Field Explorer in Action?

I’ll be hosting a webinar next Wednesday, October 22 at 9:30am PST, and I hope to see you there! I’ll be demonstrating Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer and discussing its capabilities and use cases. You’ll see how:

• Smarter searches mean reduced trial-and-error time and quicker fixes
• Knowing the scope of data contained in your logs can save you a lot of time
• Anomalies and unexpected events in your data come right to the surface

Of course, the fastest way to understand the benefits of Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer is to experience them yourself through our 14-day free trial.

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