Why do we Need Autonomous Log Monitoring?
Everything fails, all the time – Werner Vogels, Amazon
As the Amazon CTO once quoted, systems even if they are thoughtfully
designed with the utmost care and skills, may fail. Thus, it is
important to detect failures using automation to reduce the burden on
DevOps and SREs. Developers use extensive prebuilt libraries and
products to go to market as fast as they can due to the high-velocity
development lifecycle. It is the onus on the SREs to keep the service
alive and keeping the MTTR (Mean time to recover) to a minimum. This
leads to a problem when the system becomes a black box for SRE and they
have to put observability on top of it. Without knowing the internals
and without having complete control over the logging information and
metrics, they may run blindfolded sometimes until they learn more about
the system, new issues, and until they improvise their playbooks or
write a solution to prevent failures from happening in the future.
That’s the human way of solving problems — learning by mistakes.
It is quite a common scenario in a large distributed system when there
is an incident, the teams spend a lot of time to capture the right logs,
parse it and try to correlate to find the root cause. Some teams are
better, they automate log collection, aggregates them to a common
platform, and then do all the hard work by searching into the ocean of
log data using tools like Elastic or Splunk. It works fine when you
understand the log structure and all the components and know what to
look for. But as I mentioned above, it is really hard to keep the data
structure consistent for a long time across all components. Most of the
current log monitoring and collection tools just provide the capability
to collect logs to a central place, parse the unstructured data, allow
you to search or filter, and show visualization or trends. What if the
system generates a new type of log data or pattern for which you have
not automated or planned in advance? It becomes a problem.
That is the point when you really need autonomous machine learning to
scale.
Automation is the key to detect such incidents, anomalies in the
system — and proactively try to prevent as much as possible to reduce
the chances of failure and improve recovery time. — Google SRE
Handbook
Typically when an incident occurs, support engineers try to manually
peek into the ocean of logs and metrics to find interesting errors and
warnings and then start correlating various observations to come up with
a root cause. This is a painfully slow process where a lot of time is
wasted. This is where Zebrium machine learning capabilities helps in
automatically correlating issues observed in logs and metrics of various
components to predict the root cause.

Introducing Zebrium
The Zebrium autonomous log and metrics monitoring platform uses machine
learning to catch software incidents and show IT and cybersecurity teams
the root cause. It is designed to be used with any application, and it
is known for its ease of use and quick set-up with customers, who also
say the system often delivers initial results within hours of being
installed. Unlike traditional monitoring and log management tools that
require complex configuration and tuning to detect incidents, Zebrium’s
approach to using unsupervised machine learning requires no manual
configuration or human training.

->Zebrium Dashboard<-
Zebrium aggregates logs and metrics and makes them searchable using
filters through easy navigation and drill-down. It also allows us to
build alert rules — but most of the time you won’t have to! It uses
unsupervised machine learning to autonomously learn the implicit
structure of the log messages. It then cleanly organizes the content of
each event type into tables with typed columns – perfect for fast and
rich queries, reliable alerts, and high-quality pattern learning and
anomaly detection. But most importantly, it uses machine learning to
automatically catch problems and to show you root cause without you
having to manually build any rules.
You can learn more about how Zebrium works here.



Integrations
Zebrium provides various types of log collectors that can pull logs from
Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, ECS, Syslog, AWS Cloudwatch, and any type of
application.
Zebrium + ELK (ZELK) Stack — see here

Zebrium provides good integration with existing Elastic Stack (ELK
Stack) clusters. You can even view the Zebrium incident dashboard
inside Kibana. You can do so by doing the following:
- Configure an additional output plugin in your Logstash instance to
send log events and metrics to Zebrium.
- Zebrium’s Autonomous Incident Detection and Root Cause will send
incident details back to Logstash via a webhook input plugin.
- Incident summary and drill down into the Incident events in
Elasticsearch is available directly from the Zebrium ML-Detected
Incidents canvas in Kibana.
- For advanced drill-down and troubleshooting workflows, simply click
on the Zebrium link in the Incident canvas.
Third-Party Integrations
Zebrium’s Autonomous Incident & Root Cause Detection works in two
modes:
- It can autonomously detect and create incident alerts by applying
machine learning to an incoming stream of logs and metrics. The
incident alerts can be consumed via custom webhook, Slack, or email.
- Zebrium can also consume an external signal that indicates an
incident that HAS occurred, and in response, it will create an
incident report consisting of correlated log and metric anomalies,
including likely root cause and symptoms surrounding the incident.
A special class of integrations relates to this second mode, including
integrations with OpsGenie, PagerDuty, VictorOps, and Slack.
Furthermore, Zebrium integration can be extended to any custom
application using webhooks.
Security
- Logical separation and an optional physical separation of data are
possible. Each organization’s data is stored in its own schema with
proper access control. For those who need further security (physical
separation), a dedicated VPC is used.
- Multifactor authentication and encryption. Data at rest is encrypted
with AES-256 encryption.
- Handling of sensitive data – Zebrium provides a way to filter out
sensitive data/fields. It also provides a way to clinically remove
data if uploaded accidentally.
- The system runs in AWS which has PCI DSS, Fedramp, and other leading
industry security certifications.
What did I like about Zebrium?
- Quick and easy onboarding with no manual training or rules setup
differentiates this product from others.
- Comes with native collectors to consume logs from Kubernetes
clusters, Docker, Linux, and AWS Cloudwatch.
- SaaS-based – provides easy access through Web and Webhooks. This
could be a problem for a few who want an on-premise setup.
- Integration with Elastic (ELK) is a plus.
- Unsupervised machine learning doesn’t require any input to train
initial data.
-
Grafana integration is provided to chart Zebrium collected data.
- Easy to understand pricing structure. A $0 plan to try the core
features. 🙂
What can be Improved?
- Integration with AWS Cloudwatch is provided but not with various
other cloud providers like Google, Azure, etc.
- Integration with incident management systems like ServiceNow etc
typically deployed in Enterprises is not documented. It may be
possible using the webhooks but I haven’t tried.
Conclusion
Machine intelligence is the key to automate and scale in a large
enterprise environment which can reduce operational cost by reducing
DevOps/SREs and increase MTTR that can radically transform the
business. With the unsupervised learning algorithm used by Zebrium, It
becomes easier to find a better correlation between incidents and
failures from the log data and metrics without requiring human effort.
Zebrium has provided simplified onboarding, that requires no
configurational changes in the application or human training, and an
easy to navigate UI. It is an appealing next-generation choice in the
space of autonomous log and metric management platforms.
Please try their free version to play
around with the autonomous machine learning algorithm on your log data
and let us know about your thoughts on autonomous log monitoring.
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