Hello, and welcome to this short lecture, where I want to discuss a few of the different benefits that logging can bring you and your infrastructure. For some, many people consider logging an afterthought, something that is implemented after it's too late. This is often the case where an incident or breach of security has occurred that resulted in a delay of resolution and safeguarding of your environment. In hindsight of these situations, logging would have been a great idea to have had running and implemented in the first place to rectify the event quickly and efficiently, or even prevent it from happening in the first place.

So how can logging help?

Generally, logs are created by services and applications which contain a huge amount of information, which is recorded and retained on persistent storage, to be reviewed and analyzed at any time that it might be needed. Some logs can be monitored in real time, allowing automatic responses to be carried out, depending on the data contents of the log. From an auditing perspective, these logs are invaluable. They often contain vast amounts of metadata, including date stamps, source information such as IP address or usernames, and this is especially true when you're looking at CloudTail logs. These logs can be used to help you achieve specific compliance certifications that require evidence of traceable and auditable actions that have been carried out. 

Being able to resolve an incident as quickly as possible is paramount within your organization. Whether it's a priority one, two, or three, being able to gain as much insight into what happened just before and just after the incident can significantly reduce your time to resolution. Using logs to ascertain the state of your environment before and after and even during the incident provides clarity and enables you to detect where the incident occurred, allowing you to pinpoint your efforts in a specific area. Quicker resolution results in a better customer experience for your organization. 

By monitoring the data within your logs, you're able to quickly identify potential issues that you want to be made aware of as soon as they occur. By combining this monitoring of logs with thresholds and alerts, you are able to receive automatic notifications of potential issues, threats, and incidents, prior to them becoming a production issue. By logging what's happening within your applications, network, and other cloud infrastructure, you are able to build a baseline of performance and establish what's routine and what isn't. By having this baseline, you are able to identify threats and anomalies easier through the use of third party tools and management services. 

To have a thorough understanding of what's happening within your infrastructure provides a huge benefit to your operational teams. Having an inside look of how your infrastructure is performing and communicating helps achieve the previous benefits that I've already discussed, and having more data about how your environment is running far outweighs the disadvantage of not having enough information, especially when it really matters to your business in the case of incidents and security breaches. 

That now brings me to the end of this lecture. There are many more reasons as to why you should be capturing data that can be logged. But I just wanted to provide a few key points to you.