With distributed application architecture containing countless pieces of infrastructure comprising the components of a scalable platform, deep visibility into each element plays a paramount role in maintaining and supporting your system. All of these components of a modern platform contain a massive amount of logs, which makes it difficult to support and maintain without proper logging. Organizations are now implementing smart ways to gain visibility into their system through logging from all application components. Not only is this providing deep visibility into a system, but businesses are realizing immense value out of these logs also.

Redwood Logistics is a great example of this. With a high volume of transportation and logistics related transactions running through the RedwoodConnect platform every day, it is essential to be able to trace each transaction with ease. Due to this, Redwood has transformed its logging solution to be able to log all transactions to one centralized solution and gain valuable insight into the data that is stored.

This Meetup will feature a co-presentation from Eric Rempel, CTO of Redwood Logistics, and Aaron Lieberman, MuleSoft Practice Manager and Lead Consultant at Big Compass. We will talk about how together, Redwood and Big Compass have transformed the RedwoodConnect platform to become an easily supportable, automated machine by providing deep visibility and enhanced traceability with centralized logging. We will describe how important it was to define logging standards at the beginning of the process, and how we use Log4j2 with MuleSoft to send logs to an external system such as ELK, Splunk, or a database (and how you can too).

The presentation will wrap up with showing the current visualization techniques that Redwood uses to consume logging data, and we will talk about the direction for the future, including data warehousing and how logging can lead to a digital chain of events, or blockchain, of related data in transportation and logistics.