In part three of our four-part series on the future of automation, we are going to look at how automated log analysis positively impact the third and most challenging question that IT professionals face – Is anything going to fail?

Automated Log Analysis

Creating log files has been a standard practice among IT professionals as they are a great source of information. However, log files are most often used when things go wrong – as a reaction after an event or outage, or when an alert is sent just before a catastrophic event. IT professionals rarely have the time or the resources to analyze logs towards the prevention of issues simply due to the volume of data being far too large to peruse manually. Thankfully, there are many new and exciting tools available that can automatically gather information from logs and forward them into a common information model database that can be very useful to spot negative trends before they become serious issues.

The new automated analysis tools such as Splunk, LogDNA, and Elastic are very effective at gathering and consolidating data from many different sources across the enterprise and can proactively report trends.

In the past, it was common to have application or system administrators actively look for anomalies as a reaction to failures. Thanks to tools like these, admins can now receive enterprise-wide reports that show trends, errors, and other anomalous events in a precise, easy to read format that they can in turn analyze and take appropriate well-timed actions.

As we reach the end of our foray into the future of automation, check out the fourth and final blog in our ongoing series where processes meet AI!