Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana annotations are great! They clearly mark the occurrence of an event to help operators and devs correlate events with metrics. You may not be aware of this, but Grafana can automatically annotate graphs by querying Loki. Here’s a look at how to use this feature. Loki queries can be used to automatically generate annotations on Grafana dashboards since 6.4.0. For every log line that is returned from a query, the text is automatically displayed as an annotation at the appropriate time.

Today's IT and DevOps teams have not one, but two, feature-rich open source Web servers to choose from: NGINX and Apache HTTP Server (which is often called simply "Apache"). At a high level, both platforms do the same core thing: Host and serve Web content. Both also offer comparable levels of performance and security. Yet when you dive into the details, you'll find that there are many differences between NGINX and Apache.

The last fifteen years have seen huge increases in developer productivity for several reasons, including the arrival of open source into the mainstream and the ability to better emulate target environments. In addition, the process of resetting a development environment back to the last known stable version has been vastly improved by Vagrant and then Docker.

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has set the beginning of a new age of data transfer. Each day, a massive number of new devices get added to all kinds of network infrastructures, transferring gargantuan amounts of data back and forth. In the next decade, we expect the number of IoTs to grow to a staggering 80 billion connected devices – practically outnumbering the human population tenfold.

The American magazine “Fortune” specializes in global banking, business and finance… What does it have to do with monitoring? Well, in one of its annual lists, the Fortune 100 (the largest companies on the planet), 92 companies use Splunk software… If we compare by volume of money, yes, Splunk would be the best software and that’s where this article would end.

So you want to install Elastic Cloud Enterprise (you know, the orchestration solution for the Elastic Stack that simplifies and standardizes how you deploy, upgrade, resize, configure, and monitor one to many clusters from a single UI/API) Installing ECE on one host isn’t tough. Installing it on two isn’t much harder. However, when you start dealing with 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., the complexity grows, as does the work involved in operating and maintaining (upgrading!) it all.

Within Elastic, the information security team is tasked with security detection and analytics, among many other activities of a typical information security team. To find abnormal and malicious behavior within our environment we leverage Elastic SIEM for investigations and threat hunting. When we find a pattern of behavior we want to be alerted on during an investigation or hunt we take the request JSON behind our investigation and put in to Watcher for alerting.

Yesterday, we announced the beta release of Logz.io Infrastructure Monitoring — our Grafana-based monitoring solution, and the planned release of a Jaeger-based tracing solution. These additions to our platform complement our ELK-based Log Management product, together constituting what is the world’s only open source-based observability platform for monitoring, troubleshooting and securing distributed cloud workloads.