In today’s digital economy, logs have become one of the most indispensable sources of truth inside modern organisations. Without them, it would be nearly impossible to keep applications, cloud platforms, and customer-facing services running smoothly.
Solutions Engineering
Dynatrace India
That said, collection alone is just the beginning. The true value of logs lies in interpreting them with clarity, purpose, and intelligence. This will be key as the digital economy scales through initiatives such as Digital India.
The limits of traditional log management
IMARC Group estimates that India’s digital transformation market will be worth USD 37 billion by 2034. However, as businesses expand their digital footprints, the amount of log data coming from applications, infrastructure, and services will continue to skyrocket.
More logs, however, do not automatically translate into better insight. Traditional log management is struggling to keep pace with modern demands. Many teams face a significant imbalance between log volume and meaningful signal, particularly as cybersecurity threats intensify.
In 2024 alone, India saw 369 million malware detections across 8.44 million endpoints. With threats hitting this hard and fast, logs get noisy, and spotting what really matters becomes a lot tougher.
Storing large amounts of log data without a clear purpose often causes infrastructure and licensing costs to spiral out of control. What should be a strategic advantage can quickly turn into an expensive burden.
In a cloud-native digital environment, fragmentation is costly as it translates directly into downtime and lost revenues. When logs are scattered across multiple dashboards, formats, and teams, it slows investigations, complicates collaboration, and creates dangerous blind spots.
Against this backdrop, the CERT-In’s 180-day log retention mandate and increasing frequency of national-level cybersecurity drills highlight the need for a smarter, value-driven approach to log management.
Turning logs into actionable intelligence
Logs become valuable when we change how we see them. Instead of treating them as background data, they should be viewed as clear signals of how our digital systems behave. The smartest organisations now collect only the logs that matter most for resilience, security, customer experience, and compliance.
Modern log management powered by AI can automatically detect anomalies, correlate patterns across distributed systems, identify root causes, and even trigger automated remediation. This reduces manual investigation, accelerates resolution times, and helps teams move from firefighting to foresight.
Selective routing complements this by ensuring high-value logs are retained, low-value logs are discarded, and the right data reaches the right systems at the right time. It helps cost control without compromising visibility. When organisations strike this balance, log management evolves from a tactical necessity into a strategic capability.
Observability and the bigger picture
While logs are vital, they provide only one piece of the puzzle. True modernisation comes from combining logs with metrics, traces, events, and context within a single observability platform. This unified approach helps teams connect the dots across environments, moving from what happened to why it happened and how to resolve it quickly.
In one instance, a global telecommunications provider that manages 15TB of logs daily, spread across thousands of dashboards and stored for extended periods, was overwhelmed by redundant data.
By consolidating these logs into an AI-powered observability platform and replacing static alerts with intelligent detection, however, the organisation could improve uptime, speed, and resilience.
With logs feeding into a single contextual layer, data becomes easier to interpret, correlate, and act upon. Technical insights, then, translate directly into business intelligence.
Unlocking the true value of modern log management
Modern log management equips organisations with the clarity and context needed to transform vast volumes of telemetry into actionable intelligence. When combined with AI, automation, and full-stack observability, businesses can analyse faster, respond smarter, and innovate with confidence.
Gain critical business intelligence from logs:
- Indian enterprises need a mechanism to automatically extract key business events or patterns-based insights from log files, enriched with IT context. This empowers business teams with real-time visibility into operations and customer trends, while IT teams benefit from early detection of technical anomalies. Working together, they can proactively identify and address potential business issues before they impact systems or customers.
- In large, cloud-first environments, applications and services spin up and down constantly across Kubernetes, serverless functions, and new APIs. Auto-discovery is critical. It must continuously detect and collect from new or changed sources the moment they appear, eliminating blind spots, avoiding delayed onboarding and missed incidents, and reducing compliance risk such as CERT-In retention. Traditional tools that rely on manual, one-by-one source additions can’t keep up at this scale, creating gaps in security, observability, and business analytics.
Organisations need to re-evaluate their log strategies. Identifying gaps, eliminating silos, and adopting platforms that unify context and intelligent telemetry routing are essential steps forward. Logs should no longer be viewed as background artefacts but as evidence of how the business thinks and performs.
In a world where outages are common and cyber risks are rising, companies that modernise log management will gain a continuous advantage, turning the data they already possess into better decisions and stronger performance.
–Authored by Nalin Agrawal, Director, Solutions Engineering, Dynatrace India