Using logs is now as easy as producing them.

Logging is perhaps the least sexy part of writing software, yet it’s surprisingly important. There’s lots of boring stuff that causes heated arguments (like whitespace, build systems, and version control). But no-one has impassioned, snarky blogs or tweets about what format your logs should be in. Much like cell phones or the Internet, we don’t realize how we need them until it’s too late.

We’re drowning in information from our servers. Especially when dealing with distributed/Big Data systems, which are growing incredibly fast. Even when building small server clusters, my co-founder Nick and I found it hard to learn what was going on. So we chatted, “Well, what’s the biggest step forward in web accessin the past 15 years? Search!” In a few brief moments, we set about sketching up some ideas for a generalized “log search” engine, and ended up naming it “LogSearch” (we’re literalists.)

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