Loggly announced the availability of Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer a new, real-time log management user experience within the Loggly service that changes how developers and DevOps teams perform operational troubleshooting.

Previously, finding operational problems meant making assumptions about the most likely sources of trouble and validating those assumptions through trial-and-error log searches. Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer removes the guesswork and dramatically cuts search times by providing real-time, navigable summaries of all of a company’s logs that enable users to search smarter, spot anomalies instantly, and solve problems significantly faster.

According to research conducted by Loggly, when solving operational issues, the vast majority of DevOps workers spend at least 70% their time finding the issues versus fixing the issues. This can have significant business ramifications if, for instance, a customer support website isn’t loading; an order page is failing during a new product launch; or a gamer is trying to purchase virtual currency. Most organizations find problems by searching their logs using grep, awk, or sed utilities or search tools provided by their log management solution. Either way, these searches drain valuable time and resources because it’s often not obvious where to start looking for a particular problem. Engineers have to perform query after query until they hit upon a clue.

Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer works in a similar way to how the best online shopping experiences guide customers to products of interest. Logs can now be browsed by a dynamic hierarchy of log type, field names, field values and counts. So, for example, a user can look at a particular log type, choose a field name like “error status,” and instantly see the set of error status values and the frequency with which each value occurs. At a glance, the user can tell if operations are normal or whether there is an anomaly. A single click on the value displays all of the corresponding logs.

Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer utilizes the proprietary Loggly Dynamic Fields technology to organize logs by their inherent structure and generate a complete, continuously refreshed catalog of all of their fields along with the frequency of specific field values. Dynamic Fields are possible because Loggly automatically parses all log data as it’s received, not just when a user executes a search query. The time-consuming work of cataloging log data is done long before users need it, allowing for the delivery of instant results when requested. Through Dynamic Field Explorer, users gain:

- Real-time, automatically generated summaries of identified fields and their inherent structure, eliminating the need to hunt for names or spellings

- Knowledge of the scope of data contained in their logs without having to scan individual events

- Instant visibility into the most common values, anomalies, and unexpected events for every field in a customer’s log data. Users can simply click on any field to see the corresponding events.

- The ability to quickly and precisely filter log data to remove “noise”

“Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer is a huge breakthrough in log analysis,” says Charlie Oppenheimer, CEO at Loggly. “It is the output of some keen observations about how engineers solve operational problems, and we expect that soon every other log management system will be compared to it. When we watched how people navigated their logs, we realized that they were relying on the inherent structure and common field values to find what they were looking for. This insight is part of the reason why we incorporated automated parsing into Loggly in the first place and in doing so laid the foundation for Loggly Dynamic Fields.”

Loggly Dynamic Field Explorer is available today to all customers and trial users at no additional cost.