Last week AWS made an exciting announcement at their NYC Summit, which I believe is a big step in helping to reduce the cost of log management in the cloud for end users and vendors alike – good news all around!

What was announced?

Amazon announced ‘CloudWatch Logs’ which essentially allows you to send log data from your EC2 instances into CloudWatch for storage and some rudimentary analysis.

How does it work?

CloudWatch logs works by collecting your log data from your EC2 instances via a log collection agent, and forwards all log data through AWS Kinesis, their real time processing engine for streaming data, into AWS for storage. You then have access to the logs in their raw format via the CloudWatch logs console.

Why does this matter?

For me this is the really interesting part; and as the Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels put it – Amazon (who are very much aligned with the Logentries approach) want you to be able to “measure relentlessly.” If you think about it, innovation is all about being able to perform new experiments, measure them and then iterate on the results.

And in typical AWS fashion, Amazon is helping to do this by making it easier to collect log data from across your AWS environment and also by driving down the cost of doing so. This is good news for AWS users as it makes it easier and cheaper to collect your logs. But it’s also good news for Log Management and Analytics vendors like Logentries for much the same reason. AWS is now making it easier for vendors to collect and access log data and to be able to add value on top of the basic features that AWS provide, such as intelligent alerting, real-time tagging, live tail, field level extraction, analytical search functions, shareable dashboards, etc.

What next?

I would expect to see AWS sending more and more log data from the different AWS services into CloudWatch logs in the coming months. Also expect to see Log Management vendors taking advantage of this new logging infrastructure to suck out all that rich AWS log data to provide additional capabilities for analysis and insights on top of what CloudWatch logs provide.

See for yourself:

You can check out the full keynote from Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogles, here:

For a preview of the Logentries CloudWatch and CloudTrail integration, get started for free here: