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How can log analysis help modern businesses?

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log analysis

Collecting logs and analyzing them is an essential part of running any kind of application. It provides you with information on system stability, localize and fix the bugs quickly, and prioritizes improvements from the backlog.

While it may seem to be a purely technical part that should be done by your system admins or other members of the IT department, in fact, all business units benefit from log analysis. It contributes to the effective work of all the departments starting from finance to marketing, especially strategic business units. Here’s how:

Better resource management

Analyzing uptime and resource consumption events can help with proper resource allocation and plan the adoption of new tools. The outcome of such analysis may be the hardware upgrade if you see systematic CPU spikes or switching a web server from Apache to NGINX or Litespeed to sustain more users.  Another example is changing the approach to log monitoring.

If you manage several web server instances powered by NGINX, logs may rapidly grow in size and overload log storage. That’s why they require a centralized environment for effective processing. Here’s where you can start managing the NGINX logs in the cloud or seek other optimization ways.

Optimization of work processes

Usually, investigating system issues is a time-consuming process for your tech team, and sometimes, they may need several hours to track the root cause of the error. By implementing log analysis, you can free this time for your team to take other important tasks. One more positive effect for business is transforming the way of handling incidents and adopting a proactive strategy. You will see the patterns and likelihood of failures and learn to react to the issues before they become critical.

Fueling marketing campaigns

Log analysis as a part of data analytics brings valuable information that helps to maximize your marketing efforts. By checking data about the incoming traffic, transactions, and CTRs, it’s possible to measure the success of promos, newsletters, and other marketing activities. It also serves as a powerful instrument for researching user behavior. The number of clicks, navigation scenarios, and frequency of logins can tell a lot about your users and their needs. Having this information, your marketing specialists will improve the user journey and optimize the marketing funnel based on the data retrieved from logs.

Strengthening security

Data breaches and cyber-attacks against your business are always damaging to your reputation and budget. Last year the average cost of a security incident was equal to $3.86 million, and this number is yet to grow. Investments in log analysis initiatives will make your system more secure and prepared for hacking attempts. With its help, you will be able to identify weak points in the system, identify abusive activity (such as port scanning, uploading malicious files, cross-scripting attacks, or brute-force). Modern log monitoring software supports automatic actions based on specific triggers, so you can automatically block suspicious requests. As a result, you can rest assured that your application is safe and sound.

Using tools for log analysis can help you to transform tons of raw data into meaningful and actionable items that can be used to take your business to a new level when it comes to decreasing customer churn, attracting new audiences to your application, and offering unparalleled service which is probably one of the most important aspects.

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