Last updated at Tue, 31 Oct 2017 13:52:12 GMT
Log data is everywhere. From mobile apps and desktops, to servers and massively distributed applications, just about everything generates log data that can be useful for optimizing IT processes. But with the focus on IT, we can sometimes overlook the potential for finding business improvements by analyzing that same data we usually use for IT problem solving.
1. Improve the Customer Experience
One of the simplest and most powerful uses for log data is to analyze user behavior information from your customer-facing systems and draw on it to improve the customer experience. By analyzing data like server workloads, query response time and usage patterns, you can optimize the delivery of those customer-facing services.
For example, businesses tend to schedule activities that will suck up resources, such as major system backups and updates, based on local time. But with Internet-driven businesses, local time might not accurately reflect the times of highest workload for your systems. Within visibility into application usage patterns from log data, you can schedule actions that would negatively impact the user experience during periods of lowest activity, limiting impact to the smallest number of customers.
2. Get Marketing Insights
From the business perspective, there is an incredible amount of useful data that can be found. In the case of one of our customers, a provider of industrial parts and equipment, analyzing the log data from their website allowed them to more accurately target their marketing efforts. 
Using data from the access logs and their product sales, they were able to identify patterns in purchasing behavior based on geographic regions and time of year. This information enabled them to target specific items to specific customer sets based on the frequency that items were being viewed and purchased. Similar data gave them insight to determine that for a certain subgroup of products, more than 30 percent of customer interest was coming from Canada, justifying the development of marketing campaigns to expand their sales in that region.
3. Inform Resource Decisions
Because log data can reflect the way resources are being utilized, it’s a critical part of the equation when a business is looking to expand services. By evaluating the log data that shows how and when resources are used, the practicality and viability of moving to cloud services can be more accurately assessed. This information directly translates into how funds are allocated and can be a strong guideline for projecting budgets when moving to cloud services because log data accurately reflects not just current utilization but both peak utilization and growth over time.
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