Last updated at Wed, 01 Nov 2017 20:00:43 GMT
Every scenario is the same. A forward-thinking Operations team gets their hands on a swift log management and analysis platform. Two or three individuals on the team become analytical masters. And finally Operations becomes a knowledge mecca, until the business users find out.
As soon as business users know what sort of data the Operations team has at their fingertips, they can’t help but ask for some of that knowledge for presentations, reporting, user or system research, performance troubleshooting., the list goes on and on….
You now have log paparazzi.
Organizations usually make the decision to embrace log analysis as a better way to monitor performance, respond to issues, and increase visibility. But the first time you take a great dashboard you created, and share it with a business user, product manager, or the executive team, you will trigger a chain reaction of similar requests.
While these requests are important, historically, they can take a lot of time, and are rarely part of your regular responsibilities.
In today’s world where every business is (in some part) a tech business, leveraging system and application data, and sharing it with the entire organization, as I will talk about in this post, is incredibly important.
If the data were to only live with the Operations team, the organization would be missing out on a great decision-making tool. But, many older log solutions can be too complex for other people on the Ops team to jump right into, much less a business user.
There are some tools available that are finally making the value of log data accessible to the whole DevOps, IT Ops, and business teams.
By selecting a log analysis tool that focuses on streamlining dashboard creation, query creation, and sharing you can easily get ahead of your business users and their needs.
Here is how you can respond better and faster…and still be famous:
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Spend a little time thinking like the business users and you will know what they are after. Create the dashboards in advance, and set-up email alerts for the appropriate users. They get the data, without you playing the middleman interruption. Or, ask them directly what type of reporting they are looking for and create custom tags and alerts for the events you know they will want to be tracking. Also, agree up front on definitions, such as: what is a user, what is churn, what is an interesting event, what are the various types of errors, outages, and their severity.
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Choose a platform that allows you to streamline query design. By allowing you to avoid turning to queries first, or by providing a standardize query language, the platform should make your reliance on queries less. Helping you produce results faster, but also allowing you to teach the basics to others easier.
Readability of the reports is key. Speak the business user language. This means in report naming, tagging, and log fields and values. Make sure to feature the data they are looking for, with the agreed upon naming, so they can easily use the log data report and present it without your help!
- Pick a platform that has built-in UI/UX that a business user can understand. With an easily accessible service, your colleagues across the business can likely login, run their saved searches and create the data visualizations they need without your help.
While you might have enjoyed being the new analytics king, but I’m sure you are more interested in spreading the log love across your business. To do this, you need a platform that provides high-level results that any user (including non-technical) can obtain and understand. This also allows you to delegate, and respond faster to more complex cases. The results will be that you get to stay a data rock star, without getting behind on operations.
