Change is the currency of software success. This need to change and grow is the basis for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Each year, new industries embrace this philosophy of constant change, but without the necessary data underpinning their decisions, every deployment is a risk. When you enrich your software delivery with log data coupled with best practice log management, you mitigate this risk and enable rapid, safe change in your organization.

Logs are often the most common source of information about an application’s behavior. They provide context as well as result, opening up far more information than a simple count metric will. Despite the immense insight that they can offer, organizations regularly overlook them. Many leave their logs in files on servers, far away from the CI/CD pipeline that needs them. It doesn’t have to be this way; with some best practices, every part of your business can collect, analyze and utilize the hidden knowledge within your logs.

Add Life to Log Data With JSON

Logging in an unstructured format dramatically increases the complexity of detecting patterns in your logs. By logging your application output in JSON, you open up the possibility of analysis of all of your logs. This gives you a top-down view of your entire system while still maintaining readability. This empowers your CI/CD pipeline by allowing you to query and filter your logs, which then enables you to focus in on the problem and precisely diagnose any unwanted side effects of your latest change.

Create Actionable Alerts

If alerts are defined and channeled correctly, have context and can be interpreted easily, they will be actionable, add context and offer greater value. It is difficult to provide context when a single metric exceeds a threshold, but log lines are more sophisticated. They can include additional information to provide context and allow us to pinpoint the source of the issue fast. This is an essential capability for a company embracing CI/CD.

Prioritize Your Logs

Structured logs often come attached with a severity, which indicates how seriously we should investigate an event. An INFO level log signals business as usual, but an ERROR demands immediate attention. Once your logs have these tags, you can make intelligent, automated decisions that will automatically respond to unwanted changes in your system.

Benchmark Each Version to Understand ‘Normal’

“Normal” is a complicated idea when working in a microservices architecture. It may be safe to ignore a minor slowdown of a single service, but an unfortunate combination of events can lead to disaster. Benchmarking enables us to see these disasters well before our users. Benchmarking is the act of recording what the normal behavior of an application is. After each deployment from your CI/CD pipeline, compare your new behavior with your previous benchmark. If something is out of the ordinary, logs provide the information you need to act decisively. They provide an outstanding baseline signal for your benchmark.

Analyzed Logs Can Level up Your CI/CD Pipeline

Building a CI/CD pipeline is not the most difficult part. Neither is the deployment of new features. In fact, the greatest challenge facing any organization wanting to deliver their changes via a CI/CD pipeline is observability. With a best-practice approach to the preparation, curation and analysis of application and system logs, we can overcome this challenge and confidently change at a pace that propels us to the forefront of our market.