DrupalCon Barcelona 2015: Visualizing Logfiles with ELK Stack

From a DevOps perspective, live websites are fascinating creatures likely to behave differently on your live servers than on your development environment.

We’re all crazy about Drupal, continually developing and pushing functionality to our servers all the time.

There comes a point when we want (and need) to know how we’re doing. Are there errors? How are users engaging with new features? Are backend jobs running smoothly or rather throwing errors — with nobody watching them?

Let’s put an end to this madness! By visualizing your log events, you’ll gain a better understanding of how your sites behave, and you’ll also see when things go over 9,000. ;) In the culture of DevOps, we want to empower everyone with easy access to their logged data. In this session, I’ll show you how to archive this goal.

We’ll cover how to make use of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK Stack) to gather information about our sites and how to use these systems for performing content audits. We’ll also cover how to navigate the bumps you might expect during getting the stack running and share best-practices when using those tools.

Your knowledge of logfiles will change in a way where you’ll almost never want to go back to simple logfiles again (for most purposes of course ;) )!

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.