It’s time for us to present our weekly roundup of posts that our authors have written. Check out our weekly digest below.

Software logs by themselves aren’t very useful. This isn’t a secret. Developers around the world spend hours building quality logging into their applications, but those logs by themselves aren’t very helpful. To leverage those logs effectively, you need great search. When you’re troubleshooting an issue, you don’t have time to comb through logs line by line. That’s why lots of teams turn to software solutions to filter their logs. Two of the most popular are Elasticsearch and Splunk. When you’re comparing the two, you’ll see some big differences. Not just in their cost, which is substantial, but in the ways that you’ll need to work with them as a team. In this post, you can learn the primary attributes of each and help you figure out the best log search functionality for your team. Find out more from Eric Boersma on Scalyr’s blog. 

We also updated a post this week on Zipkin. Zipkin is a Java-based distributed tracing system to collect and look up data from distributed systems. Too many things could happen when a request to an HTTP application is made. A request could include a call to a database engine, to a cache server, or any other dependency like another microservice. That’s where a service like Zipkin can come in handy. An application could be sending timing data in the background so that when it’s time to troubleshoot, you can have an integrated view with Zipkin. In this post, you’ll learn what Zipkin is and why it matters in microservices or a distributed system architecture. Check it out on Scalyr’s blog.