Ask any system administrator what’s high on his list of pain points and chances are you’ll hear something about extracting meaningful information from log files quickly.

Most IT systems, be they small business applications, enterprise middleware stacks or mail servers, produce text files that log what happened and when it happened. But when things go wrong, it often needs considerable skill and experience to make sense of the data, more so when that data is scattered across multiple log files. Compounding the problem is that most log data is unstructured and no two companies are exactly alike.