Build Stuff'15 Ukraine

Have you ever seen the message “This file is too large for Notepad to open”? If the answer is “yes” and you happen to develop, test or operate a software system, chances are good that your system continuously generates log files, and that message appeared when you tried to open one of such files.

There are several solutions and workarounds to this problem, but let me suggest that if you regularly need to inspect your system’s log files with a plain text editor, you’re doing it wrong. And you’re doing it late. Your system is capable of instant visualization of its health and activities. And it’s easy to achieve.

During this talk we will demonstrate how to feed Elasticsearch indexes with logs from an arbitrary application using Logstash or similar log processing tool and then build an activity dashboard using Kibana. We will also show how to change the format of logs from plain text to rich structures better suitable for semantic interpretation. We will be using free community editions of all tools that are available on all major platforms.