Logs as data

Log files generated by web servers, databases, networking infrastructure, and back-end systems are a valuable source of operational and behavioral data for a business. In the past, these files were mostly viewed as a source of diagnostic information in the case of failure, but with lowered cost of storage, and availability of tools such as Splunk for indexing and retrieving millions of events, they can also be a source of customer insights. Treating logs as data and storing complete logs instead of just collecting predefined metrics provides a means to answer novel questions that a business could not have previously anticipated.