Logs are continuous digital records of events generated by all components of your software stack - and they're everywhere - your networks, servers, applications, containers and cloud infrastructure just to name a few. The data logs provide are like an X-ray for your IT infrastructure. Without logs, this lack of visibility creates operational challenges for managing modern applications that drive today's digital businesses.

Digital Transformation Drives Demand for Analytics
Businesses across Asia Pacific and beyond are moving to the digital world, using software as a primary driver for innovation and growth. Modern applications are front-and-center, driving this revolution. In fact, IDC expects over the next three to five years that the percentage of enterprises with advanced digital transformation strategies and implementations will more than double. However, the success of this transformation depends on businesses ensuring their modern applications evolve at the fast pace of market shifts and customer needs. IT teams must be able to efficiently handle increasing complexity of IT architectures and environments; the explosion of growth in the volume, velocity and variety of machine data; and the need to deploy application improvements and enhancements consistently and seamlessly.

Data analytics is the foundation of digital transformation and is embedded in nearly all of today's modern applications, with actions that are automated based on real-time data analysis (think of apps like Uber or Pokemon GO). This need for real-time data is why log data is a critical aspect of IT operations and management in order to ensure the best possible customer experience.

Log Data Matters
Log data provides critical visibility into the health of the application and infrastructure stack, and without logs, the internal operations on most IT components would be inscrutable. For example, in the event of a security incident or operation outage, DevOps, ITOps and SecOps teams often do not have insight that allows them to quickly resolve the issue. This lack of visibility into their stack can create higher application latency and more system outages, which translates into poor customer experience and customer churn.

Knowing where to look to pinpoint problems that cause customer satisfaction issues, applications to slow down, system-wide outages or security threats are primary reasons for the existence of logs. Each individual log contains a stream of events, and includes wealth of data about software and related infrastructure performance, availability, user access and behavior. Happily, in today's tech-driven world, logs are pretty much ubiquitous. By analyzing these logs, one can proactively detect and resolve issues that impact the business.

Conclusion
Every supporting service or component of a modern application is logging every action or event that takes place within it. In order to draw meaningful insights from these ever-growing logs, you need a scalable platform that centralizes and simplifies how you collect and analyze data so that you can gain deep visibility across your full application and infrastructure stack. Mastering log data will enable you to the minimize complexity and risk in your IT environment and ensure an "always-on" customer experience which in turn, will help accelerate the journey to digital transformation and increase competitive advantage, business value and growth.