Last week it happened again. Geek2Geek!
This time we came together at Flyeralarm in Berlin to talk about centralized logging. That is an interesting topic for all companies which have to scale. As soon you have more than 1 server you need to think about how you collect and analyze your log files in a distributed system. There are a couple good solutions out there for this problem.
Jilles van Gurp did the first talk about the ELKstack. ELK stands for E = Elasticsearch, L = Logstash and K = Kibana. All three products belong to the Elasticsearch company and they work all together smoothly in harmony. Jilles showed us how they use the ELK stack at Linko to build the LinkoApp.
Jilles gave us a short intro to the technology on a couple slides before he switched to the live demo. It was very interesting to listen to his real-world experiences with the ELK stack.
The learning from the past couple months are, it is easy to setup but you should be careful with the Elasticsearch cluster. Don’t shut it down all at once 😉
After the first presentation the Pizza arrived and we took a little break with Pizza & Beer.
Lennart is THE guy behind Graylog2. He started the project a couples years ago at Jimdo. The very first version was implemented in Ruby. Graylog2 is a completely rewrite in Java. Lennart is also CoFounder of Torch, the company behind Graylog2.
Lennart gave a short intro about the history, intention and philosophy behind Graylog2.
I was impressed how much he knows about the other logging solutions, such as Logstash/Kibana and Splunk. He was not afraid to talk about feature comparisons and pros & cons of the different solutions.
Graylog2 is build for Enterprise usage. It is optimized for speed and high volume data. The interesting thing is that you can use it together with Elasticsearch and Logstash.
Many thanks for to Jilles and Lennart for the great talks. Both solutions are very interesting. If you still read logs on the server with “less” you should definitely check out these 2 great solutions!
By the way. I also tried to organize a Splunk talk, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any Splunkies willing to give a talk about Splunk at Geek2Geek.
Many thanks to Flyeralarm for sponsoring Location, Pizza and Beer! You guys are awesome!
By the way Flyeralarm just opened a new branch in Berlin. They have a really nice office. This is their meeting room for example.
And they are currently looking for experienced PHP developers. If you are interested you should contact Thomas.
Robert Reiz 