The blog of DevOps Summit, the IT conference that my log analytics software company Logz.io is sponsoring later this year, published an essay of mine on how marketing and IT need to work together:
DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics.
Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many different analytics tools. They need DevOps engineers in general and server log data specifically to do their jobs well. Here’s why: Server log files contain the only data that is completely full and accurate in the context of how search engines such as Google are crawling websites.
If a search engine spider encounters an error and does not load a page, the webmaster does not know because traditional traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics do not track those issues. Log file data, on the other hand, does reveals what problems bots are encountering on a website – and many of those issues can hurt a site’s appearance and rankings in Google.