In recent years, Box's engineering team was growing concerned that its legacy backend for reporting was not scaling. And as Box's roadmap was growing, the Observability team was interested in adopting a more reliable and cost effective solution for application and operational logging than what Splunk provided.
These were mission-critical processes taking on heightened importance — especially as Box continued on its path of transforming a monolithic infrastructure into hundreds of microservices to enable it to grow, innovate, and deliver new customer-facing features.
Because Box's legacy logging solution was priced on the amount of data ingested, sometimes Box would have to cut logging projects to limit costs or Box engineers would decide not to log events from newly deployed microservices.
That was a fact of life at the time, and was at odds with Box's mission to rapidly transform itself into a leading Cloud Content Management platform. This transformation required Box to break down its monolith into microservices, a direction that requires more and comprehensive logging — not less.