March 2025 Logs for Lunch Recap: Catching Anomalies in the Cloud & Deeper Insights with Logs

Overview

This month’s Logs for Lunch session brought together IT professionals to explore Catching Anomalies in the Cloud & Deeper Insights with Logs, highlighting how LM Logs can streamline troubleshooting and proactive monitoring. Our experts explored real-world use cases, demonstrating how logs provide deeper visibility into diagnosing an anomaly in your cloud storage permissions before it becomes a major problem!

Register to watch the replay! 

Summary:

Overview

This webinar, hosted by Tom Chavez, introduces Logs for Lunch, a new webinar series for 2025. The session covers the importance of logs in troubleshooting and monitoring cloud and infrastructure issues, featuring two live demos by Nick Doane (Sr. Sales Engineer) and David Femino (Product Team). The discussion highlights LogicMonitor’s (LM) log analysis tools, their AI-powered anomaly detection, and their ability to streamline IT operations.

Key Takeaways

1. Challenges in Log Management

• Logs are typically owned by security teams, making it difficult for operations teams to access them.
• Organizations often deal with log overload, multiple tools, and lack of a unified view.
• Querying logs across different tools requires expertise in various query languages.
• LM Logs simplifies log access and analysis by integrating with LM Envision.

2. How LM Logs Helps

• Unifies log data across cloud, on-prem, and network devices.
• Reduces troubleshooting time by up to 80% through centralized log analysis.
• AI-powered anomaly detection filters out noise and focuses on unusual patterns.
• Streamlined access for Ops teams—no need to rely on security teams for logs.
• Hot storage for all logs, ensuring quick and easy searches.
• Flexible retention options (7 days to a year) based on business needs.

Demo 1: Troubleshooting Cloud Issues with LM Logs (Nick Doane)

Nick demonstrates how LM Logs’ anomaly detection can quickly pinpoint and resolve issues:

1. Scenario: A Frontend Application Failure
• A 404 error surge is detected in an Azure-based app.
• LM Logs automatically correlates error alerts with related log anomalies.
• AI filters 20M logs down to 71 anomalies, surfacing the most critical entries.
• A user, John Johnson, is identified as having made a change in Azure storage.
• The public network access setting was disabled, causing 404 errors.
  
  
2. Resolution:
• Quick identification of who changed what using log analysis and anomaly detection.
• No need for query language expertise—LM Logs automates log filtering.
• Faster root cause identification without escalating to higher-level engineers.

Demo 2: Advanced Log Querying & Aggregation (David Femino)

David explores how to extract insights from logs using LM Logs’ built-in query features:

1. Log Querying Simplified
• Type-ahead key-value filtering (e.g., resource:name).
• Automatic log metadata extraction (log levels, syslog facilities, etc.).
• Visual filtering—click-to-query without learning complex query languages.
  
  
2. Advanced Log Analytics with Operators
• Count logs by resource to identify "top talkers."
• Aggregate log sizes, track storage usage over time.
• Time bucketing: Group log data into 24-hour windows for trends.
• Parsing log fields dynamically (e.g., extracting Access Keys from AWS logs).
• AI-powered anomaly detection reduces the need for manual data sifting.

Final Notes & Upcoming Events

• Live Q&A: Attendees ask about log storage, AI filtering, and query best practices.
• Elevate User Conference:
• Dallas (April), Sydney (May), London (June)
• Includes demos, training, and networking.
• Next Webinar:
• Patrick Sites (Product Architect) will showcase new LM Logs features.

Takeaway: LM Logs is built to simplify log analysis, provide quick insights, and enhance operational efficiency without requiring deep technical expertise in querying logs.

Questions:

Q: Will any portion of elevate be available online?
A: Yes, all Elevate sessions will be recorded for playback for free.

Q: Where can I find more info about advanced search operators?
A: Advanced search operators are covered here:
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/advanced-search-operators

Q: Any other resources?
A: I also love this resource, the Logs Search Cheatsheet:
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/lm-logs/logs-query-language/logs-search-cheatsheet
Example queries can be imported from our git repo as well.
ehttps://github.com/logicmonitor/log-queries

What’s Next?

Next Logs for Lunch: Accelerating Troubleshooting with Logs 
April 9, 2025 12noon CT / 10am PT / 11am MT / 1pm ET
Register and get more information here

Elevate Community Conference: Join us in Dallas, TX (April 30), Sydney, AUS (May 29), and London, UK (June 25), to gain strategic insights, hands-on product experience, and exclusive networking opportunities. Elevate 2025 will showcase the latest innovations in AI-powered observability, empowering enterprises to optimize their modern data centers.

Find more details and registration links here!

What Came Before?

Did you miss the Logs for Lunch presentations and demos from January and February? Catch up on the great topics covered earlier this year, including our opening meeting of 2025 in January with a LM Logs overview and demo of Troubleshooting a Tomcat app, and the second meeting in February focused on Network Observability and Wireless Connectivity.