Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The cloud’s elasticity—the ability to scale resources up and down in response to changes in demand—as well as variable cost structures offer significant advantages, enabling enterprises to move from rigid capex models to elastic opex models where they pay for what they provision, with engineers in control and focused on innovation, becoming true business accelerators.

It’s been another busy few months here at Gremlin. Overall, our team has been working on feature improvements to enable teams to measurably improve the reliability of their systems, whether that’s through broadening platform support so you can run Gremlin in more places, making it easier than ever to identify reliability risks, or improving reporting so you can manage reliability programs effectively at enterprise scale. Here’s a summary of what’s new.

Splunk is pleased to announce the general availability of Federated Search for Amazon S3, a new capability that allows customers to search data from their Amazon S3 buckets directly from Splunk Cloud Platform without the need to ingest it. Enterprises rely heavily on cloud object storage services as the de facto destination for their new data to leverage the cost, compliance, security, scalability and manageability benefits that cloud platforms can offer.

Imagine being able to foresee future trends, anticipate customer behaviour, optimize your operations, and take actions that are not just reactive — they shape the future of the market. In the world of data-driven decision-making, we're able to do all that by paying attention to the information we analyze from predictive and prescriptive analytics. A large and growing field, data analytics is often broken into four categories — of which predictive and prescriptive are two!

To successfully observe modern digital platforms, a new data collection approach was needed. And OpenTelemetry (OTel) was the answer - an industry-agreed open standard - not a single vendor's approach - on how observability (O11y) data should be collected from a platform. This separates out data collection from the vendors’ platform of data processing and visualisation, making the data collecting approach vendor agnostic.

In August, a ransomware attack hit another company. Unfortunately, it hit a regional cloud provider in Europe this time, and we can call this a “critical hit.” So far, we know a virtual server got compromised and used as a jump host; from there, the attacker started to encrypt all volumes in the same domain. Based on pure luck or some profound reconnaissance, the same server migrated into a different data center and continued its unplanned job from there.

The Oil and Gas sector, responsible in part for two industrial revolutions in the last 300 years, has been something of a laggard when it comes to adoption of new technologies. Cloud and edge penetration in Oil and Gas is late compared to other industries, mainly due to long standing concerns around security and data privacy.

In today’s world of relentless data growth, security-relevant logs represent a small snapshot of an organization’s overall environment. Teams are beset with a variety of data types, including performance metrics and traces, asset configuration and state, audit logs, and much more. On top of that, teams are expected to scan all of this to compare against industry best practices and join this data with logs and metrics for added context.

Elastic Observability is the premiere tool to provide visibility into web apps running in your environment. AWS App Runner is the serverless platform of choice to run your web apps that need to scale up and down massively to meet demand or minimize costs. Elastic Observability combined with AWS App Runner is the perfect solution for developers to deploy web apps that are auto-scaled with fully observable operations, in a way that’s straightforward to implement and manage.

In the ever-evolving world of software engineering, the landscape is constantly shifting. New technologies emerge, best practices evolve, and how we build and run software continues to change. However, when it comes to incident alerting, it often feels like we're stuck in the past.