The competition is on for DevOps teams that are expected to rev up production on a multitude of projects, with teams and companies aiming to stay atop the global software product marketplace. The complexity of code creation and the pace of deployment has picked up in recent years, and DevOps managers are starting to face serious challenges of scale and efficiency.

Constant code generation is the first obstacle. Imagine a team producing millions of lines of code, working for weeks and hoping for a smooth release. But testing time arrives, and there is a total data meltdown.

Wasting valuable programming hours is not an option, but what if managers had the tool to turn back the time to a version before the mistake happened? Managers or developers may view logging as an incredibly boring activity, but it is vital. It serves like a black box of what went wrong—but also a way to roll back the bad code, and return to a more manageable situation.

Logging and tracking habits ensure that a DevOps team will not see their code fail in production, and cause expensive breakdowns in service. Logging becomes more than a wishful addition, but a pivotal tool that may save a project.

Data is proliferating, code is constantly being written to offer innovative products or support existing ones. There is a massive amount of data projected to be generated in 2025, only a few short years away, if the global IT production sector keeps increasing its activity. This amount of data to be kept and logged would be roughly 10 times higher compared to the data generated in 2016. This issue has plagued Silicon Valley, but also worldwide tech centers: how to keep track of what is going on. How do companies such as Instacart, Lime and OpenAI track their changes and ensure viability and awareness of errors?

There is the new role for DevOps managers: ensure fast, modern and stringent log management. Dedication to logging means generating tight order out of the chaos of code creation. The right tool will be economical, intuitive and fast, ensuring the possibility for control in what could become a runaway data meltdown.

Logging is one of the pillars in the modern DevOps department, and while now it is important, it will become indispensable, along with metrics and analytics.

DevOps are already aware of the possibilities of logging, to keep track of multiple avenues in product creation, from databases to server side events, and even the effects and behavior of users.

Stringent log management means making use of a valuable resource of knowledge and decision making, but also operating with a complex system of data. DevOps managers will need the tools to span the demands of stringent log management, for a multi-step process involving log generation, transmission, analytics, storage, archives and disposal.

The right logging system can streamline those steps. Inexpensive logging tools and systems can unify log management across teams and simplify the process of logging. More services are appearing each day, either cloud-based or self-hosted, and with varying levels of security. With increasing complexity and the drive to create ahead of the competition, it would be the task of DevOps managers to make the team aware of the tools, and to provide tools intuitive and fast enough for the good habit of logging and log management.

— Chris Nguyen