What is Machine Data

With the rise of cheap storage and processing, we are in a better position to extract and process any type of data that can help with insights.

Any type of data produced by programs and processes is useful for us, we can use logs, network packets, any type of metrics and performance clues.

This means a large amount of unstructured data that is ready for our consumption and use.

Because of the nature of the data we are most likely going to focus on time series analysis.

An example of use case is to monitor the pages visited

Advantages and disadvantages of machine data

Database performance is always a great concern, hitting logs and not databases is a great advantage, but we need to be cautious with the impact on the network bandwidth.

Relying on data being spilt away from the processes is a risky matter, it can change at any time without notice, this is not part of the core features of the platform.

You can easily leak confidential data if you are not careful, logs are less controlled than databases.