Software engineers don’t want logs to exist in a vacuum
Our data indicates that software engineers need access to log data alongside application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring to pinpoint the cause of errors when error rates increase, or when memory usage spikes.
The above chart shows that 56% of New Relic customers surveyed in our State of Logs report 2022 use infrastructure monitoring with logs together, and approximately 14% use logs alongside APM monitoring. Collecting application logs and making them useful has been a pain point for software engineers. With the introduction of features like New Relic automatic logs in-context and forwarding from APM agents, it is now easier to find the problematic needle in the haystack. As a result, we are seeing a 68% year-over-year increase in customers using APM alongside logs and this percentage is expected to rise.
NGINX is the most common type of log
When looking at the most popular log type, NGINX is the most used, capturing 38%, followed by Syslog (25%), ALB (20%), and Microsoft IIS W3C (9%). Web servers, load balancers, and content delivery networks (CDNs) are often used by software engineers to perform wellness checks on applications. They are not easily monitored with agents, which is why these three are the most common type of log sent to New Relic.
Java has a commanding lead with the most application log data
When examining popularity around languages, the data shows that 50% of all logs ingested by language agents comes from Java. Java has a commanding lead over .Net (26%), Ruby (22%), and Node.js (2%). The Java lead aligns with the overall popularity of Java with software developers and the adoption of the Apache Log4j.
Firehose will soon be the de facto log forwarder for AWS serverless users
When looking at the most used Amazon Web Services (AWS) in cloud environments, the following table shows Amazon Lambda in the top spot, with 46% of all AWS users in our customer pool adopting the technology. While Lambda has been the main serverless tool for software engineers to use to transfer logs and metrics into CloudWatch automatically, the growth rate of users adopting Amazon Firehose is staggering and we anticipate Firehose taking the lead in early 2023.
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