DevOps teams live and thrive not just on their tools but their capability to communicate discoveries in a timely fashion. To do this, a multitude of DevOps tools are on the market, but Logentries, producer of a SaaS cloud-based log analysis tool, has added a few team-based features to their product that DevOps teams will find useful.

Today, Logentries announced team-based enhancements to its DevOps oriented log analysis tool. Amid these enhancements the logging tool has received team-based annotations, sharable dashboards, group notifications, and an open API.

With the addition of team-based annotations in particular Logentries hopes to give DevOps teams a tool to drive quicker insights into problems.

Team-based annotations melds together two tools in an innovative way by essentially attaching an issue-tracker to the log analysis back-end. Log analysis is already used by DevOps teams to detect, fix, and predict root-level problems with systems, but once a problem is found and fixed an issue- or bug-tracker is used to communicate its existence to the rest of the team.

Logentries hopes to give teams a jumpstart on solving problems by having annotations pop out of insights from log analysis that show past issue documentation. Once one DevOps professional finds a problem via log analysis she can place an annotation citing her solution and when a similar pattern of problems is discovered later by another DevOps engineer that earlier annotation would appear.

By centralizing issue documentation in real-time contextualized with log data on the back end, team members can communicate, share expertise, and discover knowledge without needing another tool.

Log analysis for the cloud and an Open API

Logentries already has a wide variety of integrations into popular cloud providers (such as AWS) and has agents and hooks for OS platforms, but for everything else there’s the Open API. With the API developers can roll-their-own code on any given platform to connect back to the Logentries service. The API will allow developers to send and retrieve data, configure tags and alerts, and allow integration with third-party APIs (such as PagerDuty, HipChat, and Campfire.)

The developer-centric takeaway from the Open API is the capability to draw data from any OS, platform, or device. Giving a DevOps team the capability to rapidly build full end-to-end logging capability across an entire system.

And, for DevOps teams who implement automated configuration and deployment, it will allow developers to build config hooks into Logentries. This would allow a team to easily automate configuration for large or auto-scaling environments.