Logging is essential for successful DevSecOps teams. Logs are filled with the information needed to monitor and understand systems. Tracking down a defect? Trying to understand a sudden burst in questionable logins from a new region? Need to figure out why an app is crawling? Logs are that single source of truth for understanding what’s really happening.
But there’s a problem that comes along with logs: the sheer amount of data. The information logged by services and applications just keeps on growing. And growing. It doesn’t take long for it to become more—much more—than can be managed. The data becomes overwhelming. Alert fatigue sets in.
Data keeps growing. Human resources can’t.
But there’s hope on the horizon. Innovations in AI have revolutionized the process of continuous log monitoring. AI algorithms can analyze and detect patterns within vast datasets, translate raw logs into actionable insights, and proactively alert teams to problems—all at a scale and at higher precision to assist humans.
Let’s look at 8 ways that AI can maximize the value of logs.
1: Handling massive amounts of data
First, the most obvious. Cloud-native environments, with their dozens (or hundreds) of distributed components, emit a massive volume of log data. In turn, this data requires high levels of expertise to sift through and analyze it all.
But most organizations already face a shortage of people with the skills needed to tease out the insights from this data. Companies could train more people—but training is slow. And the growing complexity of the data tends to outpace any new skills.
Here is where AI shines: It’s a scalable way to handle log data, no matter the volume and no matter the time. Humans need breaks; they clock out for the day, get sick, take PTO, and play Galaga when bosses aren’t looking. But log data still arrives in massive volumes, regardless of the time of the day or day of the week. An AI-based system with analysis, detection, and alerting is always on.
2: Automated security and access control
When dealing with logs, it’s important to protect any sensitive user information and ensure that the data is only accessible to authorized team members. SecOps managers often implement fine-grained access control to ensure that the approved team members have access to (and only to) the data or metrics intended for use.
AI systems can automatically identify and redact sensitive information—such as personal identifiers, financial details, or confidential business information—from log data before it's accessed by humans. Or, as part of automated preprocessing, AI can de-identify or mask sensitive parts of data.
3: Collating data from disparate sources
Merging data from various sources is a complex task. But it’s essential for effective security and operations. When logs are properly aggregated and correlated, the resulting data and metrics can give the context needed for better visibility and better troubleshooting.
But this is a menial and time-consuming task … which makes it perfect for AI. AI can automatically gather information from various sources and identify patterns within the data, making its analysis easier.
AI correlates data from different sources far more efficiently than a human. Modern log analytics tools leverage AI to gather log data from cloud services and on-premises environments. Log analysis and issue resolution become proactive, preventing negative impacts on the health of applications and systems.
4: Transforming raw log data
Organizations depend on skilled professionals to handle and analyze log data, yet they often face overwhelming resource constraints. This is where AI can contribute significantly, by automating repetitive tasks and enhancing human capabilities.
Before analysis, log data often required cleaning and preprocessing to remove errors, duplicates, or irrelevant information. AI can automate this process, ensuring the accuracy and standardization of all the data. AI can also organize log data into clusters based on similarities or classify them into predefined categories. This helps manage data more efficiently, making it easier for humans to understand and act upon the insights derived.
5: Analyzing log data
A clear use case for AI within a DevSecOps strategy is the automation of repetitive and time-consuming tasks—such as data cleaning, feature selection, and model training. With AI taking on these tasks, developers can focus on other tasks.
AI can sift through a mountain of data to spot duplication and anomalies—like subtle signs of a cyberattack or unusual traffic patterns—that might easily slip past human scrutiny. This yields enhanced security and operational insights.
It’s more than just about handling the volume; AI is adept at detecting patterns that are too complex or too faint for the human eye to catch. For example, let’s consider logging and monitoring for a network to catch signs of data exfiltration. This kind of anomaly might manifest as an unusually high volume of data being sent to an unfamiliar external IP address during off-hours; that’s a pattern that might not immediately raise flags for a human amid thousands of legitimate data transfers happening every day.
On the other hand, an AI-based system that’s trained on vast datasets of normal and malicious network behavior can identify this subtle pattern by correlating different indicators:
- The timing of the data transfer
- The volume of data
- The destination IP address
- The type of data being transferred
For a human, recognizing such a complex pattern requires painstaking analysis and might be missed entirely due to the sheer volume of log data. But an AI system can continuously monitor for these patterns across the entire network, detecting potential threats with precision and speed that far surpasses human capability.
6: Reducing alert fatigue
Traditional infrastructure and service monitoring solutions are notoriously noisy, often generating alerts for events that don’t signify a genuine threat. Excessive unactionable alerts lead to alert fatigue.
AI-based alerting intelligently filters alerts and reduces the noise, ensuring that the alerts generated are relevant and actionable. For example, traditional monitoring can’t adjust for seasonality—so a crossed threshold in the middle of a high-season weekday afternoon gets as much attention as one in the middle of the night during what should be a slow week. AI-based alerting uses historical data to continually train its models, factoring seasonality into its baselines. The result is fewer false positives and no more alert fatigue.
Of course, organizations using AI-driven alerting need to rigorously test results in order to tune specificity and sensitivity. This ensures that critical events are captured effectively.
7: Proactive monitoring
Given the large amounts of data an organization generates, teams often struggle to monitor all the organization's resources proactively.
AI is well-equipped to address this issue at scale. By continuously monitoring and aggregating logs from across entire environments, an AI-based tool can identify anomalies before they become widespread, allowing teams to detect potential threats in their initial stages.
For example, the threat detection and investigation from Sumo Logic provides the visibility to address advanced threats before they affect operations. AI features such as this enable real-time monitoring, alerting, and data analysis across security tools, cloud infrastructures, and SaaS applications. This enables a DevSecOps team to investigate and respond to cyber threats swiftly.
8: Efficient incident response
AI-driven alerting improves incident response by facilitating automatic resource allocation and gathering contextual information about an incident. This helps identify potential security threats faster, which in turn helps organizations respond more quickly.
When AI-powered logging and observability platforms provide automated remediation features, teams can connect the dots: from continuously monitored logs to incident detection to remediation playbooks. Automated playbook execution means near-immediate response to an incident, whether that’s eliminating the root cause or alerting an engineer to begin an investigation.
Remember, with every delay in responding to a security incident, the window for impact widens. Minimizing that delay with AI directly minimizes the impact of an incident.
Privacy concerns related to AI adoption
One last note: as we’ve seen, AI shows great promise as a tool for improving logging. But remember that it’s still an emerging technology.
As a recent GitLab report makes clear, there are serious privacy concerns around AI adoption. While 83% of the teams surveyed said implementing AI in their development process was essential, 79% said they were highly concerned about privacy and IP when dealing with AI. But in many business contexts, AI tools need access to that private data for analysis.
So take advantage of AI, but be aware and guard against any privacy concerns.
Drowning in log data? AI is here to help.
Logs are crucial. They’re a rich source of data for monitoring applications and infrastructure. But the multiple data sources and volume of log data—along with the sensitivity of some of that data in the logs—lead to some big challenges in managing log data, security, and privacy.
AI is here to help. Modern log management and SIEM solutions are leveraging AI to automate analysis, enhance monitoring, and improve incident response. AI is making DevSecOps more efficient. And as AI solutions evolve, their role in log analysis will only grow, offering smarter, faster insights into logs.
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