Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2020

How to instrument a polyglot microservices application with Elastic APM

One of the challenges introduced by microservices architectures is the ability to understand how the application performs and where most time is spent. The Elastic Stack and Elastic APM can provide observability for modern, microservice-based solutions as well as monolithic applications. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) combines different technologies to provide a deep, transparent and holistic view of what each service component is doing, where, when, and for how long.

Elastic APM: Free and open application performance monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a critical part of a unified observability strategy. APM offers deep insights into application performance and behavior, and organizations depend on it to deliver performant and high-quality digital experiences to their customers — both for keeping a proactive pulse on the health of their applications and for troubleshooting issues.

Elastic APM adopts W3C TraceContext

Distributed tracing remains one of the most important features of any tracing system. Nearly a year ago, we announced Elastic APM distributed tracing, let’s take a look at how this useful feature works behind the scenes. Over the past few years, many applications have adopted microservice architecture. Each of the services in a microservice architecture can have their own instrumentation to provide observability into the service.

Elastic's tips and tricks for working at home

A lot of businesses are thinking about the future of virtual work and how to make it successful in light of recent world events. For managers and employees used to working in a traditional office space, moving to remote work can be a challenge on many fronts. How do I and my team stay motivated and productive? What’s the best setup for a home office? Most importantly, how do I separate office work from the duties I normally perform around the home?

Elastic SIEM is free and open for security analysts everywhere

Security teams must protect attack surfaces that are becoming bigger and more distributed due to the growth of remote work, cloud infrastructure, and other dynamics. These teams understand that meeting this challenge at scale requires the successful incorporation of the appropriate technology into their security operations program.

From distributed tracing to distributed profiling with Elastic APM

Distributed tracing is great — it helps you identify (micro)services within complex architectures having issues interfering with user experience, such as high latency or errors. But once a problematic service is identified, it can be difficult to find out which methods are to blame for the slowdown. Well, we have some big news to share for our Elastic APM users within the Java ecosystem.

Searching GitHub: Improving developer efficiency with Workplace Search

More than 40 million people use GitHub as a collaboration tool for building software around the world. For most companies — including distributed teams like Elastic — GitHub has become a critical content source for building software, holding much of the information and knowledge upon which the organizations are built, across items like issues, pull requests, and more.

Adversary tradecraft 101: Hunting for persistence using Elastic Security (Part 1)

Last month, we hosted a webinar, Hunting for persistence using Elastic Security, where we examined some techniques that attackers use in the wild to maintain presence in their victim’s environment. In this two-part blog series, we’ll share the details of what was covered during our webinar with the goal of helping security practitioners improve their visibility of these offensive persistence techniques and help to undermine the efficacy of these attacks against their organization.

How a swarm of satellites and Elastic help BlackSky build near real-time business analytics reports

BlackSky monitors the globe from space, the air, the ground, the internet, environmental sensors, asset tracking sensors, satellites in space, social media feeds, industrial IoT, and other sources too numerous to name. Once gathered in their Elastic-powered analytics engine, all of the data from these disparate sources is correlated, compared, and cleaned.

Virtual Meetup: Monitoring the COVID-19 Outbreak Using Elastic Stack

Melvyn Peignon, Elastic Education Architect, will be sharing information about Kibana, with an example of how to build your own personalized dashboard to track COVID-19 outbreak around the globe, using a public data source, of course. In this presentation, you are going to learn how easy it is to index any kind of data in Elasticsearch, transform it using ingest node and analyze it using Kibana visualizations, dashboards and maps.

Custom sources: Search content from anywhere with Elastic Workplace Search

Elastic Workplace Search is rooted in a simple, but powerful mission: bringing information, content, and files from every corner of your organization into a singular, centralized source of truth. Thanks to its portfolio of first-party integrations, Workplace Search easily connects to a variety of popular content platforms.

How to get started with Elasticsearch Service on AWS GovCloud

We’re happy to announce the beta availability of our new government region, AWS GovCloud (US East), for the Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud. This new region is our first step in simplifying operations for Elastic users who handle government data as we work toward gaining a Moderate authorization for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

Transparent, resource-based pricing with Elastic Enterprise Search

Until now, standard search solution pricing has been based on models that are difficult to understand, expensive to scale, and/or beneficial to only the search vendor. At Elastic, we’re taking a different approach based on the principles of transparency, fairness, and scalability, and have introduced resource-based pricing for our products running on Elastic Cloud. And we believe that this pricing approach will revolutionize Enterprise Search buying and ownership.

Europe regions are complete on Elastic Maps Service

At Elastic, we are adding data layers to our Maps Service on a regular basis. We are proud to announce that we have recently finished adding a number of layers that complete the European continent for all second level national boundaries. The list of new layers are Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Greece, Greenland, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Elastic SIEM for home and small business: SIEM overview

Hello, security enthusiasts! This is part seven (can you believe it?) of the Elastic SIEM for home and small business blog series. If you haven’t read the first six blogs in the series, you may want to before going any further. In the prerequisite blogs we created our Elasticsearch Service deployment (part 1), secured access to our cluster by restricting privileges for users and Beats (part 2), then we created an ingest pipeline for GeoIP data and reviewed our Beats configurations (part 3).

Creating meta engines in App Search to scale your search experiences

We introduced meta engines for Elastic App Search on Elastic Cloud and self-managed versions in the 7.6 release and have been thrilled to see the response to the new feature. Meta engines provide the ability to search across multiple existing or new engines. Think of adding a new search box to a page that then goes off and searches the documents in the sub-engines of your choosing.