Practical Monitoring

Write to Disk or Write to Network? Write to disk, with a service that comes along at regular intervals to send to an external location. Many log services support writing from inside the app directly to a network location. This makes it easy to ship your logs off for storage and analysis, but as your app’s traffic increases, this could become a significant and troublesome bottleneck. After all, you’re having to make a network connection every time you send a log entry, which can get expensive in terms of resource utilization. Instead, it’s better to write the log entry to a file on disk. You can have a service that comes along at regular intervals (even near real time) to send the log entries to an external location. This allows for log shipping to be done asynchronously from the app, potentially saving a lot of resources. You can have this done using rsyslog’s forwarding functionality. Alternatively, many of the SaaS logging services have agents that perform the same job.