Costa Tsaousis spoke at DevOpsDays Geneva 2024 with a talk that had one of the more specific titles we have brought to a conference: “A powerful logs management solution we all have and use, but we underestimate: systemd-journal.” We also had a booth.
The argument was simple. Every Linux system running systemd already has a structured, indexed, binary log store built in. Most teams ignore it and ship logs to an external system immediately, paying for ingestion, storage, and query infrastructure that duplicates something the OS already provides. Costa walked through how systemd-journal works, what it stores, how Netdata integrates with it for log exploration and correlation with metrics, and where it falls short (multi-node aggregation being the obvious gap).
DevOpsDays Geneva had the informal, community-driven feel that the DevOpsDays format is known for. The booth conversations were less about product pitches and more about shared problems – log volume, cost, the difficulty of correlating logs with metrics during an incident. The team came away with the sense that this event was as much about making friends in the Swiss DevOps community as it was about professional networking.
