Topic of today’s post stays a bit aside from day-to-day coding and development but nonetheless covers a very important subject: our application log files. Our apps do generate enormous amount of logs which if done right are extremely handy for problems troubleshooting.

It’s not a big deal if you have a single application up and running, but nowadays apps, particularity webapps, run on hundreds of servers. With such a scale figuring out where is a problem becomes a challenge. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of a view which aggregates all logs from all our running applications into single dashboard so we could see a whole picture constructed from the pieces? Please welcome: Logstash, the logs aggregation framework.

Although it’s not the only solution available, I found Logstash to be very easy to use and extremely simple to integrate. To start with, we don’t even need to do anything on the application side, Logstash can do all the job for us.