In April of this year, we announced that we would be providing a log feature for Mackerel. In that article, we mentioned that we were "aiming for a release in summer to fall 2026," and we are now pleased to announce that the open beta will be released on Thursday, July 16, 2026.
Ahead of the official release, you'll be able to actually try out Mackerel's log feature as a beta version. In this article, ahead of the release, we'd like to introduce what you can do with the beta version and what kinds of teams the log feature will be useful for.
The challenges we wanted to solve with Mackerel's log feature
Although we use the single word logs, there are many different types, including system event logs, security logs, and access logs. Among these various kinds of logs, we decided to focus on the logs that are handled during incident response.
In our previous announcement, we organized the challenges we felt regarding how logs are handled. To restate the key points, there are three:
- The ability to make effective use of logs tends to be concentrated among a few experienced people
- Knowledge of which logs to look at, where to look, and how to look remains tacit and isn't put into words or writing
- Approaches to investigating logs stay with individuals and can't be reproduced in the same way across the team
This becomes easier to understand when you picture an incident response scenario. An experienced engineer has a mental roadmap: "First, look at this part of this log, then narrow down here next." However, that roadmap has been cultivated through their own personal experience, and there's no guarantee that other members can follow the same path. As a result, situations arise where investigations can't move forward without a specific person being present.
For teams operating systems, the logs themselves should already exist in abundance. What was missing, however, was a mechanism to spread the ability to read logs across the entire team. Mackerel's log feature is our response to this challenge.
What you can try in the beta version
In the beta version, we've prepared two main experiences. Before getting into the detailed specifications of the features, we'd like to convey the feel of "this is how you can use it."
Anyone can browse and search logs
The first is the experience of being able to search logs and reach what you want to see. While this is the most basic foundation for starting to use logs, we've been conscious of delivering it in a Mackerel-like way.
Generally, when searching logs, you start by writing a query with the search conditions. However, when writing a query, you need to be aware of what content is contained in the logs, so gaining experience is required in order to perform effective searches. With this in mind, Mackerel's log feature lets you start by viewing the logs of the service you need and then narrowing down from there.
We've also prepared an experience for efficiently searching structured logs sent in JSON format. Structured logs consist of attribute-value pairs. When you want to search for the value of a certain attribute, you can build the search conditions easily on the screen rather than having to write a query.
Search conditions can be shared across the team
The second is the experience of being able to save the search conditions you've arrived at and reuse them across the team.
This is the part we'd most like you to try out in this release of Mackerel's log feature. If an experienced person saves a search condition for what to look at first during an incident, other members can simply call it up and trace through the same investigation approach. What was previously locked inside an individual's head—the where to look and how to look—becomes shared team property.
By combining this with the mechanism for easily searching structured logs that we mentioned earlier, knowledge like how to modify specific attribute values for tailored searches also becomes team knowledge.
In addition, even if you don't save the search conditions, we've also provided a mechanism that retains a team search history whenever you or anyone on your team performs a search. This is also useful for cases where teams repeat the same searches.
The operations of experienced people, reproduced across the team. This is also an attempt to extend one of Mackerel's defining ideas— monitoring you cultivate (育てる監視) —into the world of logs.
Who we hope will use it
We'd be especially delighted if the following people give the beta a try.
One group is engineers handling incident response as part of a team. For those who, while working with logs day in and day out, feel that they want to reproduce their own investigation approach within the team more quickly and reliably, the search and save experiences should be directly useful.
Another group is tech leads and managers of teams who feel that they want to use logs but the knowledge of where to look is locked away with specific individuals. A state in which investigation depends on a particular person becomes a source of anxiety for the team. The mechanism for sharing search conditions across the team will help resolve this anxiety.
Of course, the content is also designed to be easy to try out for those who want to seriously start tackling monitoring and log utilization from here on.
Release date and what's next
We plan to share the detailed usage and setup instructions in another article on the day of the beta release, Thursday, July 16, 2026. If you'd like to try it out right away when it's released, it will go smoothly if you prepare the following two things:
- A Mackerel account (if you don't have one yet, please sign up here)
- Following our official X account (@mackerelio)
We'll also announce the release timing and the day-of article on our official X. Stay tuned for further updates!
