Take a Closer Look at Logging
People have interacted with their environment at every moment of life. As result of these interactions, they have left certain marks behind them. With the development of technology, people leave recordable marks behind them after their digital actions on different digital medias.
What is Logging?
Logging means to being recorded the digital actions on the internet environment by computers. By means of recording these actions, every action of visitors can be controlled by the system administrator.
Is logging an obligation?
It is obligatory for website administrators to log these virtual actions taking place on the internet.
In general, the process of recording the actions on website enables website administrators to be informed about the visitors.
Therefore, in any situation that may occur in the future, effective results can be get with the records examined by taking into consideration these logs.
Why Logging is Important?
These days, security and following up on the situations closely helps us to locate the errors faster or even earlier. The importance of this got bigger accordingly the importance of being irreproachable on the services you give on the web.
The users are not patient and improvements are fast and hard to catch. If a web service or a website owner wants to keep up with its components, he/she must be able to follow every mistake and make sure that it will not happen again.
For this, logging is a strong and important tool to use. It allows you to track & solve the errors and monitor the situation of your website.
Why do I need to view Recent Logs?
Recent Logs will help you to find and locate the errors of your website with HTTP status codes included in your log files as shown below.
You can find the HTTP status code, the exact time your visitor has seen this status code, the corresponding IP address, the size of the content that the visitor wanted to reach, and the full path of the content that the corresponding status code was given.
What Are The Benefits of Logging?
An important role in providing cyber security
It is very important for the business to keep the information of different users' internet access on a public network in a separable way. This is the only way to follow the actions taking place on public networks. In case of a network attack or security threat, the network administrator is responsible for giving these information to the authorities as specified in the laws.
Additionally, if requested, website administrators are responsible for presenting the visitors’ logs to the public enterprises. So it means that the logging process is being legalized and compulsory for all website administrators.
Make your analysis on visitors easily
Since the logs have records of all benign and malicious visitors, you can make analysis on them.
These analyses help you to detect or forecast the attacks, identify malicious visitors and take precautions against them.
Legal aspect of logging process
There are many studies on fighting against the cyber attacks.
It is really important for cyber security to add a legal dimension on these studies, to protect the victim, and not to ignore the information that has any evidential value.
In accordance with the article of law number 5651 and ISO 27001 standards, each company has to log and keep these access records for 2 years in order to provide cyber security.
What are the factors that make logging difficult?
Logging is the act of keeping various log records coming from different places. There are many reasons to make logging difficult. These reasons can be listed as follows:
- Different types of logs coming from different sources,
- Determining the type of log needed to make analysis,
- Eliminating the logging practices because of their unnecessary expenses and workload,
- Being a costly process.
These factors are effective for logging process and there are many software to make them easier.
By using Merlin CDN, you can take a CDN service to enhance your site performance and get your log records with just one click by means of logging button on the management panel.
You can start using Merlin CDN with 10$ free credit.
An important point in logging process
You need to determine which needs to meet logging process under current conditions and which log types are useful. It is not useful to solve the problems or make analysis with inappropriate and wrong log records.
The situations that threaten cyber security have been easily overcome and identifying criminals has become really fast with the appropriate analyses.
You can easily collect the logs on Merlin CDN management panel. Ensure easy collection of your logs while using MerlinCDN.
What are the types of logs?
There are different types of logs in terms of aims and areas of use. Log types can be listed as follows:
Transaction Log (SQL Server)
This log type generally records all transactions executed by the website database.
Add-drop operations on the database can be recorded on log system. For example, failures occurred on the database are recorded on the logs.
Event Log
An event log stores the data on Windows systems. With this log type, you can record all of the transactions on Windows system.
In a situation that threatens cyber security, it keeps the record of login times and information of users. Therefore it helps to solve the problematic situations.
Loggable operations are accounts lockouts, login/logout processes and errors on the applications.
Syslog
In general, it collects the logs on the system daily. Example areas of usage for syslog:
- Routers,
- Printers,
- Firewalls.
Other systems using the syslog type are Unix and Linux based systems. Other features of syslog:
- Gathering general information about logs,
- Making necessary analyses
- Providing debugging messages
- System security
There are two values of syslog:
Facility
This value enables the determination of the types of logs to be recorded.
Priority
This value shows the alignment of logs according to severity levels.
In conclusion, logging is a legal obligation for web applications and essential for solving cyber crimes by making necessary analyses. If you want to collect the logs easily, you can start using Merlin CDN now and perform your logging operations with just one click.
How Do I Track User Activity with Merlin CDN?
It is important to know how your website performs when a user visits. While aiming for a flawless user experience, some cases can go unnoticed.
To help to improve the performance of your website and increase your perception of the cases Merlin CDN offers you two types of logs: Recent Logs and Raw Logs. With the Recent Logs feature, you can reach the last 1000 logs of your distribution.
On the other hand, Recent Logs provides the whole user interactions for the day in raw format. You can download the raw logs in 3 days to store elsewhere and analyze them.
Use Cases
Merlin CDN helps you to find and repair your website’s problem as fast as it can be. Hence, you can also expand filtering options and list logs for specific HTTP status codes in order to inspect and determine the problem faster.
You can also get detailed information about a specific distribution in a specific zone at the time you want (up to 3 days).
For further information about Recent Logs, you can check our article "Logs".
With Merlin CDN, you will provide the best service to your customers and visitors by determining the problem in the fastest way with this detailed log tracking feature.
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