Thomas Nelson

Thomas Nelson

Govern logging behavior at the source.

About

Founder and sole builder of Cerbi, a logging governance platform built from years of dealing with noisy dashboards, production issues, and apps that drift into messy logging behavior. Cerbi is based on a simple idea: you cannot fix bad logs after they’ve been ingested. It governs logging behavior at the source, inside the application, before bad data reaches downstream tools. My background is in .NET and Azure enterprise architecture, and I’m the author of an APress book on Microsoft Orleans. I’m also a graduate student at Harvard. I’d genuinely value honest feedback: what’s unclear, what’s missing, and what would make Cerbi more useful for your team?

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Forums

Thomas Nelson

27d ago

Why does logging quality usually fall apart as systems grow?

One pattern I keep seeing is that logging starts out useful, then gradually becomes inconsistent, noisy, expensive, and harder to trust. Field names drift, context goes missing, dashboards get polluted, and sometimes sensitive data ends up in places it never should have reached.

The deeper problem seems to be that most teams try to fix logging after the data has already entered downstream tools. By then, the cost, risk, and cleanup burden are already there.

I m curious how other teams handle this. What breaks first in practice: naming consistency, missing required context, sensitive fields in logs, alert noise, or ingestion cost? I m building in this area and want to learn where current approaches still fall short.

Thomas Nelson

5mo ago

Building governed logging + scoring (Cerbi): looking for feedback before Jan release

I m building CerbiSuite: governed logging for teams that need structured logs without accidental PII/PHI leaks or schema chaos.

This week I shipped the first end-to-end scoring pipeline: CerbiStream + logger plugins emit a lightweight scoring event (violations, required field misses, redaction hits no raw log bodies), and a new Scoring API ingests it and writes to Postgres with idempotent semantics. The goal is to make governance measurable over time (drift, coverage, risk), not a doc people forget.

In parallel I ve been doing a ton of voice-of-customer work cost sprawl, inconsistent fields across services, compliance reviews where nobody can prove what s logged, and dashboards that break whenever one team just adds a property.

Targeting a January release, aligned with Microsoft as we finalize Marketplace/ISV readiness.

Thomas Nelson

6mo ago

Founder of CerbiSuite — tackling logging chaos & governance for cloud teams

Hey everyone

I m Thomas, a principal architect-turned-founder working mostly in cloud-native backend systems (.NET, Azure, distributed apps, all the usual suspects).

Over the last few years I kept running into the same mess at every company:

  • Logs scattered across tools

  • Observability bills creeping into this can t be right territory

  • Zero governance on what people log (PII everywhere, no standards, no consistency)

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