Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2020

Creating modern customer service experiences with Elastic Enterprise Search

Let’s be honest. No one wakes up in the morning thinking of reasons to contact customer support. It’s tedious, onerous, and can eat into your evening Netflix time. Thankfully, most brands realize that customer experiences drive brand loyalty and repeat purchases.

A Journey of Elastic SIEM: Getting Started through Threat Analysis Part 1

Calling all security enthusiasts! Many of us are now facing similar challenges working from home. Introduced in 7.2, Elastic SIEM is a great way to provide security analytics and monitoring capabilities to small businesses and homes with limited time and resources. In this three-part meetup series we will take you on a journey from zero to hero, getting started with the Elastic SIEM to becoming a threat hunter.

Virtual Meetup: Advanced Threat Hunting & Monitoring with Elastic APM

Aligning security and risk management to the business strategy is imperative in driving value. With a “yes, and here’s how” attitude, CISO’s organization has now become a trusted advisor to the business enabled with preventative, detective, and responsive solutions. Tools such as application performance monitoring (APM) can shed light on the components that make up the organization’s DNA including the current COVID-19 impact and the need for a distributed workforce.

Benchmarking binary classification results in Elastic machine learning

Binary classification aims to separate elements of a given dataset into two groups on the basis of some learned classification rule. It has extensive applications from security analytics, fraud detection, malware identification, and much more. Being a supervised machine learning method, binary classification relies on the presence of labeled training data that can be used as examples from which a model can learn what separates the classes.

Monitoring Amazon EKS logs and metrics with the Elastic Stack

To achieve unified observability, we need to gather all of the logs, metrics, and application traces from an environment. Storing them in a single datastore drastically increases our visibility, allowing us to monitor other distributed environments as well. In this blog, we will walk through one way to set up observability of your Kubernetes environment using the Elastic Stack — giving your team insight into the metrics and performance of your deployment.

MITRE ATT&CK® round 2 APT emulation validates Elastic's ability to eliminate blind spots

Six months ago we celebrated the joining of forces between Endgame and Elastic under the banner of Elastic Security and announced the elimination of per endpoint pricing. Simultaneously, while the newest members of Elastic Security were getting acquainted with the Elastic SIEM team, a few of our analysts were locked away in an office at MITRE HQ for round 2 of MITRE’s APT emulation.

Virtual Meetup: Building a COVID-19 Dashboard for Non-Programmers + Inside the COVID-19 data

This session comprises of two talks by community members, catering to audience of varying tech skills. Talk 1: Building a COVID-19 Dashboard for Non-Programmers We will use Kibana to build a Covid-19 dashboard using the "Upload CSV" feature. The dashboard will feature tables, bar charts, line graphs and pie charts. We will use existing publicly available data and show easy it is to build and share dashboards

Virtual Meetup: Multilingual Data & Search - Solving the Common Problems

It’s no secret: multilingual search is hard! Each language is unique. In some languages there is no whitespace between words, in others using the dictionary form of a word is essential to finding more relevant results. Your data can be in one or several languages or even worse, one document can be written in one or more languages. How do you maximize your chances of getting relevant results? This 35min talk will cover some customer use case and the following challenges.

Elastic: Distributed by design

As COVID-19 continues to make clear, being adaptable and resilient when the world changes can help a business stay alive. At Elastic, we know from experience that being distributed helps build a strong company that can scale and adapt as new challenges arise. In the spirit of open source and our relationship with the Elastic community, we’ve been offering tips and tricks on our blog and on social media about how to work effectively while remote.

Smooth mocking with the Elasticsearch Node.js client

A classic problem that every backend developer has faced during their work is testing an application that uses a database. A perfectly valid solution is to use the real database for testing your application, but you would be doing an integration test, while you want a unit test. There are many ways to solve this problem. You could create the database with docker, or use an in-memory compatible one, but if you are writing unit tests that can be easily parallelized this will become quite uncomfortable.

SEMplicity: Scaling Large ECE Deployments

From the trenches: what does it really take to scale up a large Elastic security log deployment? Elasticsearch for enterprise security log storage & management is a hot topic today. Specular gains in performance, functionality and cost are ready for harvest. But what exactly does it take to create a large Elastic log storage infrastructure? This talk will present war stories related to at 150,000 events per second Elastic log storage implementation with 2 month retention built at a large commercial client.

Virtual Meetup: Elastic Workplace Search-Finding Where That Document Went

Supporting employees in a work from a home environment can be challenging. Do they have access to these systems? Can they locate the documents they need? This would be easier if documents are centrally located. In most organizations, documents can live in services like Dropbox, Goole Drive, and or Github. In this virtual meetup, I will show you how to create a search box between these different services and finally solve the question.. "Where did that document go?"

Free online Elastic Stack and Elasticsearch training: Anytime, anywhere, on-demand

We are offering a variety of on-demand Elastic training courses for free — featuring 11 titles that span observability, security, and Elastic Stack administration. If you haven’t tried one of our self-paced courses yet, now is the perfect time to find out why so many people have shifted their learning preference from in-class to online. Our on-demand courses provide the same immersive learning experience found in the classroom, but delivered in a convenient, remote environment.

Visualizing observability with Kibana: Event rates and rate of change in TSVB

When working with observability data, a good portion of it comes in as time series data — things like CPU or memory utilization, network transfer, even application trace data. And the Elastic Stack offers powerful tools within Kibana for time series analysis, including TSVB (formerly Time Series Visual Builder). In this blog post, I’m going to attempt to demystify rates in TSVB by walking through three different types: positive rates, rate of change, and event rates.

How to design your Elasticsearch data storage architecture for scale

Elasticsearch allows you to store, search, and analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data. This speed, scale, and flexibility makes the Elastic Stack a powerful solution for a wide variety of use cases, like system observability, security (threat hunting and prevention), enterprise search, and more. Because of this flexibility, effectively architecting your deployment’s data storage for scale is incredibly important.

Virtual safety: How to teach your kids cybersecurity best practices

Confession: I am a security practitioner. I am also a mom. What I am not is a homeschool teacher. Earlier this year, I spoke to the 5th- and 6th-grade classes at my son’s Innovation Day about cybersecurity. I discussed what it means to be a cybersecurity practitioner and how the practice of cybersecurity affects everyday life.

Generating MITRE ATT&CK® signals in Elastic SIEM: Sysmon data

Many mature security teams look to the MITRE ATT&CK® matrix to help improve their understanding of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and to better understand their own capabilities relative to these common adversarial approaches. With the release of Elastic Security 7.6, Elastic SIEM saw 92 detection rules for threat hunting and security analytics aligned to ATT&CK.

Elastic Cloud Enterprise 2.5: Dedicated coordinating layer, snapshot lifecycle management, and more

We’re excited to announce the release of Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) 2.5! This release improves the experience of managing your deployments with a dedicated coordinating layer, support for snapshot lifecycle management (SLM), and more.

Visualizing COVID-19 with Elastic

There are various publicly available data-sources that we may leverage to visualize the COVID-19 pandemic. We will use the materials created by SiScale (https://www.siscale.com/) as they have composed a rather elegant means of ingesting COVID-19 data. This document is designed to be an instructional guide on how to implement this solution locally or with the Elastic Cloud. We will first configure the necessary components, ingest the data source, then show how to create the additional Machine Learning jobs as well as creating a Canvas dashboard.

GetSet Learning: Evolving with Elastic

Evolving With Elastic Ray Myers and Eric Bjerstedt, GetSet Learning So you’ve got a search index - now what? What benefits will that investment provide as your product grows? We’ll explore the timeline of Elasticsearch adoption at an Education Tech startup as told by the heads of Engineering and Product and see how those teams juggled trade-offs between business value and technical capabilities leading to solutions neither side would have come up with on their own.

Finding a home (and career) in the open source community

Open source software development can have a reputation for abrasive behavior. The search community is a clear counterexample for me, with a culture that emphasizes respect and acceptance. This culture played an important part in my own path to open source development. A little over six years ago, I was a wide-eyed software engineer settling into my first full-time job.

Searching Microsoft's cloud productivity suite with Elastic Workplace Search

If your organization is like virtually every other in the world (including ours!), you use a mix of Microsoft products in your productivity stack, possibly including SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive. But you probably also rely on a variety of other applications, maybe even mingling in “competing” tools like G Suite or Dropbox, in addition to complementary tools like Zendesk or GitHub.

Ingram Micro chooses Elastic to bolster search, sales on ecommerce site

Ingram Micro is a Fortune 100 company with $50 billion plus in revenue and operating in 56 countries. As the global leader in delivering technology and supply chain services to businesses, Ingram Micro touches about 80% of all high tech products sold around the world. Andre Dykhno, Head of Product for Global ecommerce, says ecommerce has been a large contributing factor to Ingram Micro’s modern day successes.

Adversary tradecraft 101: Hunting for persistence using Elastic Security (Part 2)

In Part 2 of this two-part series, our goal is to provide security practitioners with better visibility, knowledge, and capabilities relative to malicious persistence techniques that impact organizations around the world every day. In this post, we’ll explore two additional persistence techniques that are being used by attackers in the wild: Scheduled Tasks (T1053) and BITS Jobs (T1197).

Virtual Meetup: Running Elasticsearch on Kubernetes

Elasticsearch is the world's most popular open source search engine. Kubernetes (k8s) is the popular container orchestration engine giving developers the flexibility to run all sorts of workloads easily. Elastic launched Elasticsearch k8s operator sometime ago. With this, one can not only run Elasticsearch on k8s but also can launch other Elastic Stack projects like APM Server, help run rolling upgrades, manage data etc. This talk is a demo of all latest features.

Virtual Meetup: Search, Full Text Search and Elasticsearch

This talk starts with the significance of search problem and its origin in history how it has been an integral part of our daily lives. Also, basics of full text search will be discussed along with the anatomy of a full text search engine by taking Elastic Search as an example. Speaker: Muhammad Junaid Muzammil is a Software Engineer with over 9 years of professional experience, along with over 4 years of experience working with Elasticsearch. He is also an Elastic Certified Engineer and one of our active Elastic user group organizers, based in Pakistan, Karachi.

The Elastic Stack: Free. Open. Limitless.

From the very beginning, the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — has been free and open. Our approach is not only to make our technology stack available for free, but to make it open — housed in public repositories and developed through a transparent approach with direct involvement from the community. Two simple principles — free and open — broke down barriers and enabled many amazing things.

Searching Zendesk: Elastic Workplace Search for customer service organizations

We’re excited to announce that Zendesk is now available as a pre-built content source, along with a host of others, as part of the Workplace Search application. With more than 130,000 customers in 30 countries, Zendesk has become one of the de facto customer service platforms in the world. Each day, millions of users interact with support agents via the cloud-based tool regardless of the support channel they choose.

Feature importance for data frame analytics with Elastic machine learning

With Elasticsearch machine learning one can build regression and classification models for data analysis and inference. Accurate prediction models are often too complex to understand simply by looking at their definition. Using feature importance, introduced in Elastic Stack 7.6, we can now interpret and validate such models.

Meetup ElasticFR Paris #44 : Monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak using the Elastic Stack

The outbreak of the COVID-19 has surprised a lot of different countries all over the world. In this virtual meetup we are going to see how easy it is to put data from the World Health Organization regarding COVID-19 in Elasticsearch and visualize them in Kibana.

Elastic App Search: A free product for building great search experiences

Wherever people encounter a search bar — whether on Google, phone apps, or while shopping online — they're conditioned to expect search experiences that deliver fast and relevant results. With this ever-evolving expectation in mind, millions of developers and organizations have chosen Elasticsearch for building powerful content discovery experiences over the years, to the great delight of their audience and user base.