New Log Monitoring Features in April

We’ve been as busy as ever making Scalyr a more powerful log monitoring and aggregation tool so you can do more from one place. While there’s still much more to come, here are this month’s new features for Scalyr users:

Responsive dashboards.

Dashboards now adjust to your window size, so you can monitor more graphs on a single screen. You can also customize the graph size, showing additional detail or squeezing more graphs per page; just add something like this to your dashboard configuration file:

graphWidth: 350,
graphHeight: 280,

Database log import and parsing.

You can now import database logs directly from Amazon RDS into Scalyr. There are also new parsers available for MySQL query and slow-query logs. A parser for Postgres logs is coming soon.

Connect multiple log messages related to a single event.

If the messages are connected by a transaction ID, process ID, or other identifiers, you can now connect those messages in the Scalyr log parser, allowing you to analyze fields that appear in separate messages. We call this “Interleaved Messages,” and you can learn more in the parser documentation.

For example, you may have an e-commerce checkout process that logs events with a unique identifier for each customer. You can now connect all log events related to your checkout system, and group them by your customer ID. As a benefit, you will be able to troubleshoot checkout issues quicker and with fewer queries.

Support for Java log4j and logback.

If you have a Java application which uses the log4j or logback logging APIs, you can now send those logs directly to Scalyr. View the library and documentation on GitHub.

Support for numeric queries in API and command-line tool.

Numeric queries return numbers rather than log records. Use them to generate your own graphs, or to drive home-built reporting and alerting systems. You can compute anything that can be displayed in the Scalyr graph view — log rates, field values, percentiles, ratios, and more. See the documentation for using numeric queries in the HTTP API, Java API, or command-line tool