Here at Scalyr we’ve been hard at work on some major product improvements, and we’re pleased to share the fruits of those labors.
1) New UI Beta: Logs & Graphs
Last year we began a ground-up rewrite of the Scalyr interface. Our goal was to preserve the speed and power that made people love Scalyr while making it easier to learn, quicker to use, and – let’s face it – easier on the eyes.
In recent weeks, you may have noticed a small “try the new UI” button on the upper-left-hand corner of the page. You may have even been adventurous enough to click it. If not, we invite you to give it a shot. You’ll find more information available at a glance, better use of screen space, and you may discover “new” product features that had been too hard to find before.
2) Breakdown Graphs
We’re excited to announce this much-requested feature. A breakdown graph allows you to quickly take any plot (such as error rate) and break it down by server, URL, or any other field in your log. This makes it much easier to narrow down problems.
Breakdown graphs are part of the new UI, so if you haven’t already switched, give it a try now.
An example: Let’s say you’re exploring the error rate across your application…
There are some pretty obvious spikes, and now you’d like to see if these issues are isolated to a single server. Previously, you’d have to use trial and error, looking at each server in turn. . With a breakdown graph, you can simply select Break Down By Server:
And there it is — each server gets a distinct plot, and you can clearly see that ‘backend3’ is having error spikes that don’t show up on the other servers.
It gets better:
You can do breakdowns by any named field. Let’s say we’re looking at the response time (appTime) of a web application:
We might be interested in exploring whether the spikes are related to a server or application issue. We already know we can run a breakdown graph across servers (and, unfortunately, in this case that’s not the problem.)
Let’s instead breakdown by another named field – controller – and see if that surfaces any issues:
Ah ha! The breakdown graph creates a separate plot for each controller, and out of 31, we can now see immediately that EventsController#sprint_index is having major latency issues and continue our investigation there.
3) Multi-Plot Graphs
The ability to view multiple plots in a single graph view is now available in the New UI. This feature brings New UI Graphs to parity with our Classic UI and is only accessible via multi-plot Dashboards at the moment. We’ll be iterating quickly and adding new features to build multi-plot graphs directly from the Graph view very soon.
4) Live Tail in the New UI
One of our most-requested additions, we’ve brought Live Tail support to the New UI. The log view will now automatically refresh your search query and stream new results to you in near real-time.
5) Scalyr Agent Now Collects Metrics from Network Devices via SNMP
The Scalyr Agent now includes an SNMP monitor to collect metrics from network devices. You can use this to collect data from routers, firewalls, or other devices that support the SNMP protocol.
6) Arbitrary Log formats for logs stored in Amazon S3
If you’re working with a service or application that deposits logs into Amazon S3, you can now import them into Scalyr. Previously, only logs from certain specific AWS services, such as CloudFront, were supported. You can now import logs of any type.
