Murron: Reliable Logging Pipeline

Slack is a communication and collaboration platform for teams. Our millions of users spend more than 10 hours connected to the service on a typical working day.

Logs & events are the critical components of business applications. The logs help us to understand how a system works, debug, analyze performance, and improve operational efficiency. They are the foundation of building distributed systems.

Logging infrastructure is a critical component for Slack; our logging pipeline drives customer billing, usage pattern, and performance analysis of the business-critical systems.

This talk walks through the first-generation logging infrastructure and some of the problems we have encountered. We will then cover the second-generation logging infrastructure design, how we added reliability as a built-in feature of the systems, the overall design principles, and some of the best practices for designing scalable logging infrastructure.