Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Being inside a company that lives and breathes logging, observability and DevOps intelligence, sometimes it takes a moment to step back and explain what we do to friends, family and others. The simplest way we explain what LogDNA solves for companies with IT systems and software is similar to a blackbox on a plane that keeps a record of the flight data and the cockpit voice recorder.

One of the major projects we’re working on for Metrictank – our large scale Graphite solution – is the meta tags feature, which we started last year and are targeting to release in a few months. A lot of people don’t realize this, but Graphite has had tag support for more than a year. Our mission with Metrictank is to provide a more scalable version of Graphite, so introducing meta tags was a logical next step.

Spring has finally sprung! I realize that was a groaner, but new features are no joke – using them will simplify your troubleshooting process and open up time for all the cool tasks you want to do. Besides parsing logs, of course.

In the beginning, the mission of the logging and monitoring team at eBay was simple: “to give out APIs that the developers in the company could use to instrument their applications [in order] to send logs,” Vijay Samuel said during his talk at GrafanaCon about eBay’s journey to using Grafana plugins. “We had our own developers who built out UIs for being able to search view and debug their issues. And metrics were no different from logs.

It is 5 a.m. Tuesday. The ETL job that populates revenue data into your organization’s data warehouse fails midway through the process. When the CFO opens the mobile dashboard to review the last day’s results, he immediately notices that the data is wrong – again. For a few hours, the on-call ETL Architect determines what caused the data-load failure, fixes the issue, and restarts/monitors the job until it successfully completes.

SaltStack is an open source configuration management tool that lets you manage your infrastructure as code. Using SaltStack, you can manage tens of thousands of servers remotely using either a declarative language or imperative commands. It’s similar to configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

The Linux Audit framework is a kernel feature (paired with userspace tools) that can log system calls. For example, opening a file, killing a process or creating a network connection. These audit logs can be used to monitor systems for suspicious activity.

Simple enough to be embedded in text as a sparkline, but able to speak volumes about your business, time series data is the basic input of Anodot’s automated anomaly detection system. This article begins our three-part series in which we take a closer look at the specific techniques Anodot uses to extract insights from your data.

“We can know one thing: shit’s gonna fail.” Last week we participated in SRECon Americas, held across three days of intensive learning with practitioner talks, hands-on workshops, socializing, and of course vendor booths. Now in its third year, attendees numbered 650 with an additional ~300 from sponsors and organizers.