Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the ability to publish VPC Flow Logs directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. For Splunk customers, this feature helps to optimize the architecture to send VPC Flow Logs directly to Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud Platform. With a fully managed service like Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, users don’t have to worry about scaling, and can optionally transform their data in near real-time and enjoy the cost-effective, reliable service.

A logging framework is a software tool that helps developers output diagnostic information during the execution of a program. This information is used to debug the program or monitor its performance. There are many different logging frameworks available, starting with simple logging libraries to full-fledged logging and observability platforms.

Without Network Monitoring, there is no good way to get a real-time view of your connected environment. But with Network Monitoring reports, you can look backwards to spot problems and trends. Just as vital are logs that deepen this rear-view mirror look, as they contain all the data for all the elements you are monitoring.

To keep Splunk running like a well-oiled machine, admins need to ensure that good data onboarding hygiene is practiced. Traditionally, this meant ensuring that your props.conf was configured with the “Magic 8” and that the REGEX in your transforms.conf was both precise and efficient.

An essential aspect of operating any application is the ability to observe the health and performance of that application and of the underlying infrastructure to quickly resolve issues as they arise. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) already provides audit logs, operational logs, and metrics along with out-of-the-box dashboards and automatic error reporting to facilitate running reliable applications at scale.

Akka’s license change has surprised many of us, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Lightbend recently announced that Akka will be transitioning from an “Open Source” license to a “Source available” license called BSL 1.1. Let’s unpack this to understand what it all means.

Written by Andrew Puch and Brian Langbecker You use NGINX as a proxy for your application, and you want to leverage your favorite features in Honeycomb to help make sense of the traffic data. Have no fear: Honeycomb is more than capable and ready to help! Things you will need: Before you start with the instructions, let’s discuss a lightweight tool called Honeytail. This utility will tail log files, parse the various formats, and send the data to Honeycomb.

As a DevOps engineer or SRE, you are often faced with investigating complex problems — mysterious application performance issues that happen intermittently or to only certain portions of your application traffic — that impact your end users and potentially your company’s financial targets. Sifting through hundreds or even thousands of transactions and spans can be a lot of tedious, manual, and time consuming investigative work.

Building, testing, and monitoring applications in the cloud is a unique challenge. While many organizations have embraced a DevOps methodology, their DevOps machine is still not at the level of maturity they might like it to be. According to a recent survey, 53% work on a team with a 'low level' of DevOps based on maturity factors.

One of the biggest buzzwords (or really, buzz acronyms) to pop up in the cybersecurity space in recent years is XDR, or, extended detection and response. The term was coined in 2018 by Nir Zuk, CTO and co-founder of Palo Alto Networks. It was posited as a new way to think about security, where data is taken from several platforms and it gets correlated and analyzed.