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Enhance microservices observability and performance with Site24x7's log management tool



Microservices are a way of designing applications as a set of small, independent services. Each service handles a specific task and interacts with others through APIs. This architecture makes it easier to develop, deploy, and scale services individually, offering greater flexibility compared to traditional monolithic systems. To support this architecture, technologies—like containerization and service orchestration frameworks (such as Kubernetes)—help businesses manage and scale their microservices efficiently, ensuring flexibility and cost-effectiveness as they grow.

But with growth comes complexity, and managing microservices isn’t without its challenges. 
Consider a fintech company where:
  • The core features—like digital wallets, payment processing, and investment management—function as independent microservices.
  • Containerization ensures these services operate smoothly in both on-premises and cloud environments, maintaining consistency and availability.
  • Resource scaling in a containerized setup adjusts automatically based on application traffic, ensuring cost-efficient infrastructure operations.
While this architecture offered the agility and scalability they needed to grow, it also introduced challenges in managing logs across the distributed environment. Logs became fragmented and scattered across services, making it difficult to trace transaction flows or identify service failures quickly and efficiently. These challenges were compounded by the lack of effective logging practices,—such as correlation IDs and structured logging—which are critical for simplifying log analysis and troubleshooting. Without such practices, identifying the root cause of problems took far too long, slowing down their ability to fix issues and keep operations running smoothly.


The impact of ignoring best practices for microservices logging


Imagine this: The operations team at a fintech company starts receiving complaints from multiple customers about failed transactions. Customers are unable to complete their payments, but the cause isn't immediately clear. The failure could be traced to any number of interconnected services—payment gateways, fraud detection, or user authentication.

The DevOps team begins investigating, but without correlation IDs they have no way to trace each transaction's journey through the various microservices. Their logs are scattered across different systems, stored in multiple microservices, and lack consistency. This forces the team to sift through logs manually, wasting hours trying to piece the puzzle together. As a result, the issue takes longer to resolve, frustrating both the team and customers.

Turning microservices logging challenges into success with best practices


After this incident, the fintech company revamped its microservices logging strategy by adopting industry best practices:
  1. Correlation IDs for transaction tracing 
    Each customer transaction was now assigned a unique ID that tracked it through all microservices. This step allowed the team to follow the transactions from start to finish, quickly pinpointing any failures.
  2. Structured logging for machine-readable data
    Logs were standardized in formats like JSON, making them easy to search and analyze. Key details—such as transaction ID, status code, and service name—were logged consistently, ensuring smooth analysis.
  3. Centralized logging for unified visibility
    Logs from all microservices were aggregated into a centralized logging solution. This gave the team the ability to search, analyze, and correlate logs across the entire system from one platform, improving overall efficiency.

Proactive monitoring and efficient troubleshooting with centralized logging


When another payment failure occurred, the team was ready. The operations team received an alert: multiple 403 Forbidden errors were cropping up, signaling potential issues with transaction processing. These errors were affecting payment flows, and the team needed to investigate quickly. With centralized logging in place, they immediately turned to the Kubernetes audit logs, starting their investigation with the recurring 403 errors:
      
      logtype="Kubernetes Pod Logs" and message contains "Payment processing failed with 403 error code"

The query will capture all logs related to payment processing failures that include the correlation ID. 

To find the exact root cause, they use the correlation ID to trace the transaction's full lifecycle.

      logtype="Kubernetes Pod Logs" and correlation_id="txn12345"

By querying with the correlation ID, they could see exactly where the failure occurred. The fraud detection service had flagged the payment due to expired API keys. With this insight, the team updated the fraud detection configuration, resolving the issue swiftly.

Thanks to the combination of proactive alerts and centralized logging, the team was able to identify and resolve issues faster, ensuring smoother operations and a better customer experience.
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The business benefits of adopting microservices logging best practices


Adopting microservices logging best practices offers significant operational benefits:
  • Proactive monitoring
    Centralized logging provides a unified view of system performance. Alerts for anomalies enable quick issue identification and resolution before they escalate.
  • Faster incident resolution
    Correlation IDs allow for end-to-end transaction tracing, reducing troubleshooting time and accelerating the resolution process.
  • Improved customer experience
    Swift issue resolution minimizes downtime, helping maintain customer trust and ensuring a seamless user experience.

The role of Site24x7 in optimizing microservices logging and troubleshooting


Using the Site24x7 log management tool, alongside its comprehensive monitoring suite, organizations can effectively manage microservices logging and improve observability. 

Key features include:
  • Correlation across microservices: Advanced queries helped the team link events together, offering a clearer view of transaction flows and enabling faster identification of issues.
  • Centralized logging solution: By aggregating logs from all services into one place, Site24x7 made it easier for the team to monitor and analyze data from a single platform.
  • Centralized dashboards: Default dashboards and widgets offer visual insights into system performance, enabling teams to quickly identify errors and inefficiencies. 
  • Scalability: The log management platform seamlessly scaled as more services were added, ensuring efficient log collection and analysis across the growing system.
  • Alerting: Using structured logging, the team set up alerts that flagged anomalies, allowing them to take action before issues impacted users.
  • IT automation: Automated responses to specific log patterns helped streamline troubleshooting and accelerate issue resolution.
  • Achieving observability at scale: By implementing a centralized logging solution, the organization unlocked full observability, ensuring seamless operations, compliance, and customer trust while managing scale and complexity.

Are your microservices ready to handle scale and complexity? It’s time to adopt logging best practices and make observability your competitive advantage.