Every log definition added to Retrospective carries some more or less important information. This information is processed by the search engine according to defined search parameters and the search results are presented to the user. Well defined configuration allows for clear data presentation but it can take some time to fine tune the splitting strategy and having to do the same for every single file added to the Retrospective wouldn’t be very convenient, would it?

If we have the best search engine in the world and we precisely define search parameters, it all comes down to how the results are presented to the human using the software as recognising the answers to our questions in rather large log entries can be harder than you think. Once again, Retrospective with its column splitting features comes to the rescue and it does it in a quick and efficient manner.

It is clear from the latest industry reports that the collection, storage and archiving of large volumes of log data from a wide variety of devices is no longer a major issue for modern log management products. However, this very success has only aggravated the growing problem of the lack of efficient tools for extracting actionable information from those vast amounts of data.

When making the decision whether to “cloud” or not there are a number of basic issues that need to be addressed, such as how valuable is the data to be stored in the cloud, how critical is easy access to and processing of that data, and of course bandwidth availability. Because while your local network may have more than enough available bandwidth for both standard traffic and log traffic, the bandwidth costs for transferring the massive amounts of log data to the cloud may prove too prohibitive.

A lot of that requires browsing log files generated by each service running on every machine. For daily supervision we only need log entries generated during last 24 or so hours. Retrospective addresses this particular need with a search feature for historical data and a ‘tail’ feature for looking at live stuff.

My running playlist on my iPod comprises around 81 tracks which totals in over 5 hours of music. The first three songs on the list sum up to precisely 15'02". Why am I sharing this you may wonder? Well, I'm going to see whether it's in fact possible to install and configure Retrospective in 15 minutes. This means I should be done by the time the third track ends.