Magento is a powerful eCommerce platform that enables site managers to fully customize their stores to meet various business needs. It also has a robust system of logging that monitors user behavior. It’s possible to use generated logs to evaluate customer behavior, but the key challenge is to consolidate the logs in one place and extract actionable insights quickly.
A log is a file that is generated automatically each time certain events take place in your system. Log files are generally time-stamped and can document everything that happens in OS or software applications behind the scenes, documenting anything that the server, network, OS, or application feels is necessary to keep track of.
The process of handling log events created by all applications and infrastructure on which they are running is log management.
To consolidate the Magento 2 logs into one place, we need a powerful log management tool like Kibana, that can be Used to analyze the large volume of logs.
Kibana – Log Visualization
Kibana is a user-friendly and completely specified interface that allows a number of graphs to browse, scan, and visualize the data collected. The visualization features of Kibana enable you to visualize data using heat maps, line graphs, histograms, pie charts, and geospatial support in alternate ways.
It’s easy to understand big data with Kibana, and you can create and share dynamic dashboards easily to frame changes to the Elasticsearch query in real-time.
These logs can be analyzed in real-time once obtained by Logstash and stored in Elasticsearch and monitored using the rich visualization features of Kibana.
Types of Magento 2 log files in Kibana
There are many logs files that will be created in Kibana like apache access and error logs, Magento system, debug, exception logs. Some of them are listed here –
Apache access logs
Access log files are used by Apache to record information about each visitor to your site. You can see which files visitors access, how requests are answered by the web server, and other details that visitors use, such as web browsers.
Apache error logs
The error logs will be used by Apache to document alerts that may signify a possible issue with a specific event or configuration.
Magento Exception logs
In Exception.log, all exceptions that occur on the Magento site are given. Ultimately, when Magento is unable to detect the correct data for loading a page or feature, an exception occurs.
Why use Kibana?
One should use kibana because of the following provided features –
- Exploring details, document by document, or via specialized queries is one of Kibana’s most basic features.
- With this visualization feature, we can use the data in our indexes to construct graphs, maps, and other kinds of visualizations.
- A Dashboard is a collection of visualizations that will be sharing with users outside the network and modified in real-time.
- In order to view a user admin dashboard, indices, and documents, Kibana ‘s settings will customize its GUI. The entire ELK platform can also be tracked by Kibana, ensuring all is working.
- This visualization tool’s machine-learning feature lets you detect anomalies in your content. This skill helps you to recognize the root causes of problems.
- It ensures the safe sharing of the visualization and dashboards, as there is an option that limits the display of information to protect data leakage.
- One of Kibana’s best features is its reporting option, which allows you to produce your visualization or dashboard reports quickly. Reports will be created automatically by submitting HTTP POST requests and can be shared with others.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is a centralized logging solution, that integrates Magento with the ELK Stack, provides the ability to manage visitors’ large number of logs and, then analyze that detail.
To get an EFK setup, you can visit our store and check our module EFK Setup for Magento 2 for further details.
For further help or query, please contact us or raise a ticket.