Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2023

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3 Ways FinTechs Can Improve Cloud Observability at Scale

Financial technology (FinTech) companies today are shaping how consumers will save, spend, invest, and borrow in the economy of the future. But with that innovation comes a critical need for scalable cloud observability solutions that can support FinTech application performance, security, and compliance objectives through periods of exponential customer growth. In this blog, we explore why cloud observability is becoming increasingly vital for FinTech companies and three ways that FinTechs can improve cloud observability at scale.

How to Reduce Continuous Monitoring Costs

Continuous monitoring is a crucial practice in the fields of DevOps, cybersecurity, and compliance. It involves the proactive and ongoing process of observing, assessing, and collecting data from various systems, applications, and infrastructure components in real-time or near real-time. Continuous monitoring is closely related to observability, which goes beyond simple monitoring to provide a deep understanding of complex and dynamic systems.

Observability Pillars: Exploring Logs, Metrics and Traces

The ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs is called Observability. A system becomes 'observable' when it is possible to estimate the current state using only information from outputs, namely sensor data. You can use the data from Observability to identify and troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and improve security. In the next few sections, we'll take a closer look at the three pillars of Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces.

Customize your data ingestion with Elastic input packages

Elastic® has enabled the collection, transformation, and analysis of data flowing between the external data sources and Elastic Observability Solution through integrations. Integration packages achieve this by encapsulating several components, including agent configuration, inputs for data collection, and assets like ingest pipelines, data streams, index templates, and visualizations. The breadth of these assets supported in the Elastic Stack increases day by day.

The Leading Release Management Tools

In today's ever-changing digital development landscape organizations face the challenge of delivering high-quality software quickly and efficiently. Developing and producing new products and updates is a compelling but fundamental part of any technology business. But ensuring the process runs smoothly to make certain that your release reaches your customers as expected can be challenging. This is where release management tools come in.

APM Today: Application Performance Monitoring Explained

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a technology approach that provides real-time information about how your software applications are performing. With a comprehensive view into application health and availability, APM can do things like: Both the importance and the usage of APM has grown in recent years. That’s because companies rely on increasingly complex applications to run their businesses. Here is what you need to know about Application Performance Monitoring.

Elastic SQL inputs: A generic solution for database metrics observability

Elastic® SQL inputs (metricbeat module and input package) allows the user to execute SQL queries against many supported databases in a flexible way and ingest the resulting metrics to Elasticsearch®. This blog dives into the functionality of generic SQL and provides various use cases for advanced users to ingest custom metrics to Elastic®, for database observability. The blog also introduces the fetch from all database new capability, released in 8.10.

How Uptime.com and Logz.io Can Streamline Website Monitoring

Maintaining the right combination of tools and integrations is essential in monitoring your online presence. To this end, Logz.io and Uptime.com — both highly-respected services in their own right — can be integrated to provide powerful analytics, uptime metrics monitoring, log management, and real-time incident alerts – all in one dashboard.

Syslog Tutorial: How It Works, Examples, Best Practices, and More

Syslog is a standard for sending and receiving notification messages–in a particular format–from various network devices. The messages include time stamps, event messages, severity, host IP addresses, diagnostics and more. In terms of its built-in severity level, it can communicate a range between level 0, an Emergency, level 5, a Warning, System Unstable, critical and level 6 and 7 which are Informational and Debugging. Moreover, Syslog is open-ended.

Sumo Logic ahead of the pack in a consolidating market

The observability and cybersecurity sector is chock full of providers from startups like StateStack and Coralogix to established organizations like Datadog, Sumo Logic and Splunk, offering solutions with capabilities of various depth and breadth that are solving the tough problems of application reliability and security.

How to Install and Configure an OpenTelemetry Collector

In the last 12 months, there’s been significant progress in the OpenTelemetry project -- arriving in the form of contributions, stability, and adoption. Being such, it felt a good time to refresh this post, providing project newcomers a short guide to get up and running quickly. In this post, I'll step through.

What's New in OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry (OTEL) is an observability platform designed to generate and collect telemetry data across various observability pillars, and its popularity has grown as organizations look to take advantage of it. It’s the most active Cloud Native Computing Foundation project after Kubernetes, and it’s progressing at an immense pace on many fronts. The core project is expanding beyond the “three pillars” into new signals, such as continuous profiling.

Coralogix vs Google Cloud Operations: Support, Pricing and Features

Google Cloud Operations, formerly known as Stackdriver, is relatively new to the observability space. That being said, its position in the GCP ecosystem makes the platform a serious contender. Let’s explore some of the key ways in which Google Cloud Operations differs from Coralogix, a strong full-stack observability platform and leader in providing in-stream log analysis for logs, metrics, tracing and security data.

What is DataOps? Process, Benefits & Best Practices Today

Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, working with data consumes time and effort. But what if there was a way to turn this data into opportunities for growth? That’s what DataOps offers. DataOps helps create a collaborative environment to improve data quality by automating manual processes. Research shows the market for DataOps platforms will grow from USD 3.9 billion in 2023 to USD 10.9 billion by 2028. This growth shows how steadily organizations will streamline their operations.

Infrastructure Monitoring Today: How It Works & What It Does

The famous phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem” isn’t a one off event for space missions or Tom Hanks — its a regular occurrence for most IT teams! Today’s IT teams are peppered with alerts indicating that something has gone amiss in their production environments. Visibility of uptime and performance is an essential part of ensuring that your IT infrastructure can power applications to meet business needs and deliver value for users.

Know Your Customer Again Revisited

At the end of last year, I wrote about using Splunk to monitor the Know Your Customer (KYC) use case that is a regulation in most Financial Services Institutions in many countries. The last part of the regulation states that continuous monitoring of your customers in terms of their interactions and transactions needs to take place.

LAMA: The Brokerage Firm's Framework for Staying Ahead of the Curve

Brokerage firms are constantly under pressure to stay ahead of the competition. They need to make sure that they are using the latest technology and techniques to provide their clients with the best possible service. With constant advancements of technologies and integrations used by these brokerage systems, technical issues do arise.

Unlocking seamless API management: Introducing AWS API Gateway integration with Elastic

AWS API Gateway is a powerful service that redefines API management. It serves as a gateway for creating, deploying, and managing APIs, enabling businesses to establish seamless connections between different applications and services. With features like authentication, authorization, and traffic control, API Gateway ensures the security and reliability of API interactions.

Apache Logs - Turning Data into Insights!

In the vast digital landscape of the internet, where websites and web applications serve countless users daily, there exists a silent but powerful guardian of information – Apache logs. Imagine Apache logs as the diary of your web server, diligently recording every visitor, every request, and every response. At its core, Apache logs capture a variety of critical information. They record the IP addresses of visitors, revealing their geographic locations and potentially malicious activities.

Why You Need An Application Performance Monitoring Tool

As organisations strive to deliver seamless user experiences, maximise operational efficiency, and maintain a competitive edge, the need for comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools becomes increasingly evident. APM tools offer invaluable insights into the performance and behaviour of applications in real-time. They go further than the conventional monitoring approach by providing a holistic view of the entire stack, encompassing servers, databases and user interactions.

5 AWS Logging Tips and Best Practices

If you’re an Amazon Web Services (AWS) user, you’re probably familiar with some of Amazon’s native services available for logging and monitoring, such as CloudWatch and CloudTrail. With that said, log management can get complicated quickly, especially if you’re dealing with a high volume of logs from AWS Lambda functions or a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment.

Gateways and BindPlane

The BindPlane Agent is a flexible tool that can be run as an agent, an aggregator, or both. As an agent the collector will be running on the same host it's collecting telemetry from, while an aggregator will collect telemetry from other agents and forward the data on to their final destination. Here are a few of the reasons you might want to consider inserting Aggregators into your pipelines: Today we will examine these reasons, and some possible architectures for implementing aggregators.

Terraform is No Longer Open Source. Is OpenTofu (ex OpenTF) the Successor?

Terraform, a powerful Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tool, has long been the backbone of choice for DevOps professionals and developers seeking to manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently. However, recent shifts in its licensing have sent ripples of concern throughout the tech community. HashiCorp, the company behind Terraform, made a pivotal decision last month to move away from its longstanding open-source licensing, opting instead for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1.

Best Practises For Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools have become a fundamental part of many organisations that wish to track and observe the optimal functioning of their web-based applications. These tools serve to greatly simplify the process through automation and allow teams to effectively collaborate to maximize efficiency, enabling you to reach the root cause of an issue before it reaches your customers.

Setting the Standard for Essential Observability: Logz.io Earns 20+ Fall G2 Badges

Logz.io is thrilled to have earned over 20 Fall 2023 G2 Badges for our Logz.io Open 360™ essential observability platform! G2 Research is a tech marketplace where people can discover, review, and manage the software they need to reach their potential. We’ve earned the following Fall 2023 G2 Badges for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Log Analysis.

Revolutionize Data Ingestion: Introducing Terraform Support for Splunk Cloud Platform

Splunk Cloud Platform has always been a powerful platform for aggregating, analyzing, and extracting actionable insights from your machine-generated data. As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, efficiently managing the ingestion of data into Splunk becomes crucial. To address this need, we are thrilled to announce the debut of Terraform support for the Splunk Cloud Platform.

Node.js Logging Tutorial

Node.js logging is an important part of supporting the complete application life cycle. From creation to debugging to planning new features, logs support us all the way. By analyzing the data in the logs, we can glean insights, resolve bugs much quicker, and detect problems early and as they happen. In this post, we will talk about the who, what, when, where, how, and why of Node.js logging. Later in this post, the “how” section will give insights into using code.

Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Building Observability Dashboards

Observability dashboards are powerful tools that enable teams to visualize and monitor the performance, health, and behavior of their applications and infrastructure. However, building observability dashboards is not a straightforward task, and many organizations make common mistakes hindering their ability to gain meaningful insights and respond to issues effectively.

The power of effective log management in software development and operations

The rapid software development process that exists today requires an expanding and complex infrastructure and application components, and the job of operations and development teams is ever growing and multifaceted. Observability, which helps manage and analyze telemetry data, is the key to ensuring the performance and reliability of your applications and infrastructure.

The Synthetic Monitoring Beginner's Guide

Synthetic monitoring is one holistic technique within the wide world of IT monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM) and it’s focused on web performance. Synthetic monitoring emulates the transaction paths between a client and application server and monitors what happens. The goal of synthetic monitoring is to understand how a real user might experience an app or website. In this article, let’s go deep with this topic.

Modeling and Unifying DevOps Data Part 2: Code

How do you come to grips with all of the code engineers are committing, pushing, merging, and deploying within your organization? Have you started even looking at that data? If not, you’re missing out on a crucial source of productivity, security, and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) data. But how can you get a handle on all of that code-related activity?

Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence in log analytics

Managing logs is a significant part of an SRE's daily grind. Scattered within heaps of log data are invaluable insights - those small bits of information that can unveil underlying issues and patterns critical for system monitoring and troubleshooting. However, in an era where the volume of logs is astronomical, how do you discern the relevant from the irrelevant? Sumo Logic's array of log analytics features comes to the rescue, wielding the might of artificial intelligence.

Native OpenTelemetry support in Elastic Observability

OpenTelemetry is more than just becoming the open ingestion standard for observability. As one of the major Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, with as many commits as Kubernetes, it is gaining support from major ISVs and cloud providers delivering support for the framework. Many global companies from finance, insurance, tech, and other industries are starting to standardize on OpenTelemetry.

Microservices on Kubernetes: 12 Expert Tips for Success

In recent years, microservices have emerged as a popular architectural pattern. Although these self-contained services offer greater flexibility, scalability, and maintainability compared to monolithic applications, they can be difficult to manage without dedicated tools. Kubernetes, a scalable platform for orchestrating containerized applications, can help navigate your microservices.

OpenSearch Services and Tools | Sematext

🚀 Elevate your OpenSearch game with Sematext! 🚀 Ready to excel in OpenSearch? Sematext offers top-tier Consulting, Training, and Production Support services, finely tuned to empower you with expertise in Opensearch's most critical aspects. Explore our comprehensive suite of services, meticulously designed to bolster your OpenSearch journey.

Data Mesh Architecture Explained

The advent of the data mesh has changed the way organizations manage and utilize data. It’s not expected to go away anytime soon. Data mesh, in short, is a popular approach to data management in the enterprise. Its primary goal is to empower teams, especially cross-functional ones. In this article, we'll delve into what data mesh is and explore its key principles. We'll also discuss some benefits of implementing this modern data mesh approach in your organization.

Out of Control: Managing log data costs in an economic downturn

Log management costs are growing, and it's a concern for companies, users, and developers trying to scale their organizations in today’s macro environment. Companies are making investments in systems that collect data from the cloud, applications, and infrastructure in order to monitor their performance and security. The amount of machine data generated every day is skyrocketing as businesses digitize and automate operations.

Class is in Session with The Observability Professor!

Please join the Observability Professor, Perry Correll, and Ed Bailey as they kick off a series of live streams about the magic and challenges of observability. In this session, Perry and Ed will talk about the foundational aspects of what is observability and its value to an enterprise. In later sessions, they will talk about steps for better telemetry from your applications and logs and how to use that data to help your business achieve clear insights into your application and customer behavior. It will be a fun and interesting discussion!

Running OpenSearch on Kubernetes With Its Operator

If you’re thinking of running OpenSearch on Kubernetes, you have to check out the OpenSearch Kubernetes Operator. It’s by far the easiest way to get going, you can configure pretty much everything and it has nice functionality, such as rolling upgrades and draining nodes before shutting them down. Let’s get going 🙂

10 Best New Relic Alternatives & Competitors [2023 Comparison]

New Relic is a huge name in the website observability and analytics industry. They’ve carved out a space for themselves in a highly competitive monitoring space, and have garnered thousands of users and hundreds of millions in revenue. New Relic is known for its Infrastructure Monitoring capabilities, but it also has a number of other tools that are just as popular. But, New Relic is not so popular with everyone.

Network Monitoring 101: How To Monitor Networks Effectively

You want your networks to operate seamlessly, but how can you guarantee that your network is performing optimally and without disruptions? Network monitoring can help. Network monitoring means overseeing a network's performance, availability, and overall functionality — allowing you to identify and resolve issues before they impact end-users. Read on for a full understanding.

10 Key Benefits of DevOps

DevOps is a practice that combines software development and IT operations to improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of software delivery. By breaking down traditional silos between development and operations teams and promoting a culture of continuous improvement, DevOps helps organizations achieve their goals and remain competitive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. To better understand how we asked engineers what key DevOps benefits they noticed since working with this approach.

Top 11 Loki alternatives in 2023

Loki is a open source log aggregation tool developed by Grafana labs. It is inspired by Prometheus and is designed to be cost-effective and easy to operate. But Loki also has some limitations, and you might want to explore some Loki alternatives for your log analytics. In this article, we will look at 11 log management tools you can use as a Loki alternative. Loki is designed to keep indexing low. It does this by making use of labels.

Elastic AI Assistant for Observability

Harness the power of generative AI to turn insights into actions. Powered by the Elasticsearch Relevance Engine™ (ESRE™), Elastic’s AI Assistant (in technical preview for Observability) transforms problem identification and resolution by eliminating manual data chasing across silos to an interactive assistant that delivers accurate and context-aware remediation for SREs.

Best practices for instrumenting OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is steadily gaining broad industry adoption. As one of the major Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, with as many commits as Kubernetes, it is gaining support from major ISVs and cloud providers delivering support for the framework. Many global companies from finance, insurance, tech, and other industries are starting to standardize on OpenTelemetry.

Kubernetes Logging with Filebeat and Elasticsearch Part 1

This is the first post of a 2 part series where we will set up production-grade Kubernetes logging for applications deployed in the cluster and the cluster itself. We will be using Elasticsearch as the logging backend for this. The Elasticsearch setup will be extremely scalable and fault-tolerant. ‍

Kubernetes Logging with Filebeat and Elasticsearch Part 2

In this tutorial, we will learn about configuring Filebeat to run as a DaemonSet in our Kubernetes cluster in order to ship logs to the Elasticsearch backend. We are using Filebeat instead of FluentD or FluentBit because it is an extremely lightweight utility and has a first-class support for Kubernetes. It is best for production-level setups. This blog post is the second in a two-part series. The first post runs through the deployment architecture for the nodes and deploying Kibana and ES-HQ.

Cloud Monitoring: What It Is & How Monitoring the Cloud Works

One of the primary goals of any IT team is to ensure seamless operation and consistent uptime. This is typically achieved via monitoring — whether on-premises, in an application or across a network, monitoring allows teams to respond quickly to a given issue or even understand potential problems before they arise. For today’s complex distributed systems, one of the more common monitoring methods comes in the form of cloud monitoring.

Correlation Does Not Equal Causation - Especially When It Comes to Observability [Part 1]

Observability has been tied up with causality from its origins in the mathematical realm of control theory in the early 1960s. A system (of any kind, hardware or software, natural or engineered) was deemed to be ‘observable’ if it generated self-descriptive data from which it was possible to infer how states of the system were causally related to one another.

Effective Logging in Threaded or Multiprocessing Python Applications

In Python development, logging is not only good practice; it is vital. Logging is critical for understanding the execution flow of an application and helps in debugging potential issues. The importance of logging for developing reliable and maintainable Python applications cannot be overstated. Python provides capabilities for running concurrent operations—either in a threaded (single process) or multiple process environment. But what implications do these different approaches have on logging?

How to Monitor SaaS Environments with Synthetic Monitoring

Today, we bring you a quick and straightforward overview of "How to Monitor SaaS Environments with Synthetic Monitoring." Whether you're a seasoned professional or a beginner in the SaaS world, understanding the basics of synthetics monitoring can give your SaaS environment a significant boost. In this short video, we're cutting through the clutter and going straight to the point. No deep dives, no overwhelming details – just a crisp, concise look at how synthetics monitoring works. Perfect for those just starting out or anyone in need of a quick refresher.

Elastic Search 8.10: Powerful personalized search powered by a comprehensive connector catalog

Elastic Search 8.10 brings programmatic personalization of your search experiences to a new level while expanding the open code integration catalog with knowledge base and communication systems connectors. These new features allow customers to: Elastic Search 8.10 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch® offering to include all of the new features in this latest release.

Getting started with OpenTelemetry instrumentation with a sample application

Application performance management (APM) has moved beyond traditional monitoring to become an essential tool for developers, offering deep insights into applications at the code level. With APM, teams can not only detect issues but also understand their root causes, optimizing software performance and end-user experiences. The modern landscape presents a wide range of APM tools and companies offering different solutions. Additionally, OpenTelemetry is becoming the open ingestion standard for APM.

How to monitor SaaS Environments with a Google Chrome Plugin

Explore the capabilities of this Chrome plugin, the 'Elastic APM JavaScript Injector'. This tool injects the Elastic APM JavaScript agent into any web page, allowing you to gather crucial performance metrics right in your browser. In this video, we walk you through the installation process, demonstrate how to set up your Elastic APM server URL, and show you how the plugin works in the background to measure performance metrics. Please remember, always respect privacy policies and only monitor sites you have explicit permission to monitor. Happy Monitoring!

Logging in Docker Containers and Live Monitoring with Papertrail

Docker’s power and versatility have cemented its place in developers’ and administrators’ toolkits. Along with this widespread adoption comes the critical need for effective logging in Docker containers. However, once you scale beyond a single container on a single machine, effectively capturing and working with logs from Docker presents a challenge. The native docker logs command quickly becomes inadequate, and you’ll need a more scalable solution.

Observability for the Public Sector: Greater Visibility for a More Resilient Digital Future

Observability continues to prove its worth. In The State of Observability 2023, the annual research report Splunk created in partnership with the Enterprise Strategy Group, we share the characteristics that set the observability leaders (those with a mature observability practice) apart from the rest.

Mezmo Logging vs Coralogix Logging: Features, Pricing and Support

Mezmo, formerly known as LogDNA, offers log analytics without any native capabilities around metrics and tracing data. While Coralogix’s full-stack observability supports logs, metrics, tracing and security data, for the purpose of this comparison with Mezmo, we will focus primarily on logs.

The Ultimate Guide to ELK Log Analysis

ELK has become one of the most popular log analytics solutions for software-driven businesses, with thousands of organizations relying on ELK for log analysis and management in 2021. In this ultimate guide to using ELK for log management and analytics, we’re providing insights and information that will help you know what to expect when deploying, configuring, and operating an ELK stack for your organization. Keep reading to discover answers to the following.

10 Best Splunk Alternatives [2023 Comparison]

In the website monitoring and observability space, there are few names that hold as much weight as Splunk. Established in 2003, Splunk is highly focused on log data visualization and analysis but offers a wide range of tools to help you monitor your applications. All of that being said, just because it’s been around a while doesn’t mean that it’s right for everyone.

Install the BindPlane Agent on Windows

Learn how to install your first BindPlane Agent on Windows, connect it to BindPlane OP server, and start shipping logs and metrics to Google Cloud Operations About ObservIQ: observIQ brings clarity and control to our customer's existing observability chaos. How? Through an observability pipeline: a fast, powerful and intuitive orchestration engine built for the modern observability team. Our product is designed to help teams significantly reduce cost, simplify collection, and standardize their observability data.

Linux Log Management: Advanced Techniques and Best Practices

Linux log management is critical to maintaining system health, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring security. This article explores advanced techniques and best practices for effectively managing Linux logs. Whether you're a seasoned Linux administrator or a newcomer, these insights will help you optimize your Linux log management processes.

How to Troubleshoot Slow Web Applications With Sematext

Maintaining a smooth operation of your web application is crucial for the success of your business. When customers encounter performance issues while using your application, it will likely affect your business reliability and customer satisfaction. This can lead to churn rate increase which will cause a loss of revenue. As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or DevOps professional, you would want to keep your product reliable for end users.

How to Extract Numerical Values from API Responses

Extracting numerical values from public or private JSON API responses can help you track and analyze data, easily spot trends, and alert on data that is important to your business. If you can passively have this information periodically come to you and if you can receive alert notifications when certain conditions are met, you can avoid checking each metric manually and – obviously – save a ton of time. Synthetic monitoring tools let you do these things automatically.

How to Periodically Extract Webpage Performance Metrics from Browser API

To ensure a good end user experience, smart businesses periodically gather performance data from their websites. They measure the responsiveness and speed of their services to ensure fast and reliable websites. Having a responsive and fast website improves companies’ conversion rates, keeps their reputation intact, and helps increase traffic and revenue. Website monitoring applications help determine whether the website achieves the desired response times and uptimes.

How to Track Your Company's Rating on a Website

Websites provide advisory services, research, and user reviews on SaaS companies to help users find the right product for their needs. Information and reviews shared by genuine users of your product or service is the strongest recommendation that can be received by your potential customers. This is why online user reviews are important for eCommerce and SaaS companies.

How to Extract Numerical Data from a Web Page for Dashboarding and Alerting

Over the years working as a software engineer and now a product manager, I’ve encountered multiple situations where I needed to extract numerical data from a page on a periodic basis and create visualizations, typically line charts to help me see trends over time. For example, I wanted to extract product prices and monitor them over time. Or, I wanted to query a search engine periodically and extract the number of matches or the position of a specific page for SEO purposes.

Grafana Loki 2.9 release: TSDB volume endpoints, remote rule evaluations, LogQL optimizations

The Loki squad is excited to announce Grafana Loki 2.9 is here! For this release, we’ve developed additional TSDB endpoints to help you better understand your log volume; introduced query language optimizations to make parsing more performant; and restructured our documentation so it is easier to use. This coincides with the release of Grafana Enterprise Logs (GEL) 1.8, so all the features discussed here are available in both Loki 2.9 and GEL 1.8.

Hot Topic: Increasing Cost-Efficient Observability with Cold Tier

Even as the global economy shows signs of a rebound, today’s observability customers are more focused than ever on driving utmost value from their investments. This isn’t simply because economics have forced organizations to closely review overhead and drive out unnecessary costs; the reality is that observability has become one of the leading budget items for every cloud software organization, full stop.

An Introduction to the OWASP API Security Top 10

If you ever watched Stargate, then you have some understanding of how application programming interfaces (APIs) work. While APIs don’t give you the ability to traverse the galaxy using an alien wormhole, they do act as digital portals that allow data to travel between applications. However, as sensitive data moves from one application to another, each API becomes a potential access point that threat actors can exploit.

Simplify Azure Monitoring with Logz.io's New Azure-Native Integration

If you’re looking to monitor Microsoft Azure infrastructure with Logz.io, we’re now making it easier than ever with our new Azure-native integration Typically, collecting infrastructure metrics from Azure involves installing and configuring data collection components on your system, such as Prometheus, Telegraph, or a number of proprietary agents that are specific to different vendors.

12 DevOps Best Practices Teams Should Follow

DevOps is a software development philosophy that helps organizations achieve faster delivery, better quality, and more reliable software, making it easier to adapt to changing business needs and customer demands. However, implementing DevOps can be challenging on many levels. It requires changes in culture, processes, skills, knowledge, and tools, which can encounter resistance from traditional silos within organizations. So, how can you successfully implement DevOps within an organization?

How to Manually Instrument Java with OpenTelemetry (Part 1)

In this tutorial, we'll be diving into the world of OpenTelemetry and its application in Java. We'll take you step-by-step through the process of manually instrumenting a Spring Boot application.OpenTelemetry is an observability framework for cloud-native software and a powerful tool for capturing distributed traces and metrics from your application. This video will equip you with the knowledge and practical skills to utilize OpenTelemetry effectively and take your application monitoring to the next level.

How to Manually Instrument Java with OpenTelemetry (Part 2)

Part 2 video on OpenTelemetry (Otel) Instrumentation for Java is out now! Building upon the solid foundation we set in the first video, this installment takes a deep dive into the realm of backend calls, with a particular focus on Redis databases. We'll also explore the power and utility of the Tracing Filter - an essential tool for efficient monitoring and troubleshooting in distributed systems.

Understand Your Kubernetes Telemetry Data in Less Than 5 Minutes: Try Mezmo's New Welcome Pipeline

Most vendor trials take quite a bit of effort and time. Now, with Mezmo’s new Welcome Pipeline, you can get results with your Kubernetes telemetry data in just a couple of minutes. But first, let’s discuss why Kubernetes data is such a challenge, and then we’ll overview the steps.

Effective Logging in Node.js Microservices

Many modern software applications are built with a microservices architecture, and Node.js has become the runtime environment of choice for many developers building microservices. However, working with logs in microservices—especially as complex applications comprise dozens (or more) microservices—is a challenging and cumbersome endeavor. Logging is a crucial part of building and maintaining an application.

Failure Metrics & KPIs for IT Systems

The game in enterprise IT is this: delivering amazing services to your customers while also reducing costs. That means the time it takes to respond to an incident is critical. Incidents can ruin service delivery and destroy your budget. Certain incidents almost surely deliver a poor customer experience. Response times, you hear? Yep, we’re talking about MTTR, but that’s not all.

Your Self-Managed Journey to Digital Resilience

If you were one of the thousands of Splunk customers who joined us this year at.conf23, you heard our CEO Gary Steele say that Splunk's mission is to help you be digitally resilient. (And don't worry if you couldn't join us, because you can catch the keynote replays.) But what is digital resilience and how do you attain it?

The 12 Cats of Observability

On the surface, business-critical IT infrastructure and cats may not seem like they have a lot in common. But they’re way more alike than you might think. Our feline friends contain multitudes, as any cat parent will tell you. They’re complex and can sometimes drive you up a wall. But once they warm up to you—and you warm up to them—the joys and benefits of having them in your life outweigh just about everything. Sounds a lot like technology, right?

What to Do When You Have 1000+ Fields?

So you have been adding more and more logs to your Graylog instance, gathering up your server, network, application logs, and throwing in anything else you can think of. This is exactly what Graylog is designed for, to collect all the logs and have them ready for you to search through in one place. Unfortunately, during your administration of Graylog, you go to the System -> Overview screen and see the big bad red box, saying you are having indexing failures.

Azure Event Hub logging, monitoring and alerting

Here is a blog about Azure Event Hubs monitoring and how Serverless360 helps you do it. Azure Event Hub is an event collection service and big data streaming platform. It is highly scalable and can handle millions of events per second. Azure Event Hubs are simple, secure real-time data and instantly connect millions of devices across platforms.

Logz.io Shines Again! Named on Constellation Observability Shortlist

Logz.io continues to be recognized as a standout observability platform, this time being named by the Constellation Shortlist for Observability. Logz.io—provider of the Open 360™ platform for essential observability—was among 14 vendors selected after a review of more than 50 solutions based on client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and other internal research.

Manual instrumentation of Java applications with OpenTelemetry

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

Auto-instrumentation of .NET applications with OpenTelemetry

In the fast-paced universe of software development, especially in the cloud-native realm, DevOps and SRE teams are increasingly emerging as essential partners in application stability and growth. DevOps engineers continuously optimize software delivery, while SRE teams act as the stewards of application reliability, scalability, and top-tier performance. The challenge?

Tutorial: Collecting Logs From Azure Block Blob Storage Account

Sumo Logic’s Azure Block Blob Storage solution provides an event-based pipeline for shipping monitoring data to Sumo Logic. This tutorial describes the Azure-Sumo event-based pipeline along with its components, and elaborates the data flow in the pipeline. The video also explains the Azure Resource Management (ARM) template that is used to build most of the components in the pipeline.

Coralogix Logging vs GCP Logging: Features, Pricing and Support

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a wide range of features to support their core deliverable, highly available and scalable infrastructure-as-a-service. One of the features—GCP’s log management and available via GCP Log Explorer— is offered to support customers’ basic logging requirements.

Install BindPlane OP Server

Install the BindPlane OP server in under 2 minutes! It's that easy... About ObservIQ: observIQ brings clarity and control to our customer's existing observability chaos. How? Through an observability pipeline: a fast, powerful and intuitive orchestration engine built for the modern observability team. Our product is designed to help teams significantly reduce cost, simplify collection, and standardize their observability data.

Breaking Through the Threshold: Leveling up ITSI Adaptive Thresholding with Splunk AI

Adaptive thresholding is a key capability in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) that enables customers to dynamically monitor the status of their key performance indicators (KPIs) and derive meaningful service insights and alerts.

Deleting Fields from Logs: Why Less is Often More

Logs serve as an invaluable resource for monitoring system health, debugging issues, and maintaining security. But as our applications grow more complex, the volume of logs they generate is increasing exponentially. While logs are crucial, not all log data is equally valuable. With the surge in volume, costs associated with storing and analyzing logs are skyrocketing, impacting both performance and cost. The need for effective log management is more urgent than ever.