Zebrium Blog

At Zebrium, we have a saying: “Structure First”. We talk a lot about structuring because it allows us to do amazing things with log data. But most people don’t know what we mean when we say the word “structure”, or why it allows for amazing things like anomaly detection. This is a gentle and intuitive introduction to “structure” as we mean it.

Have you ever spent time tracking down a bug or failure, only to find you’ve seen it before? Or a variation of this problem: at the completion of automated test you have to spend time triaging each failure, even though many are caused by the same bug. All this can impact productivity, especially in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments, where things change rapidly.

Developers and testers constantly use log files and metrics to find and troubleshoot failures. But their lack of structure makes extracting useful information without data wrangling, regexes and parsing scripts a challenge.

It takes great skill, tenacity and sometimes blind luck to find the root cause of a technical issue. And for complex problems, more often than not, it involves leveraging log files, metrics and traces.  Whether you’re a tester triaging problems found during automated test, or a developer assisting with a critical escalation, dealing with data is painful.

According to Gartner, product analytics, “help manufacturers evaluate product defects, identify opportunities for product improvements, detect patterns in usage or capacity of products, and link all these factors to customers". The benefits are clear. But there are barriers – product analytics are expensive in terms of time, people and expertise.

We structure machine data at scale