Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Picture a perfect world where all logs shared the same layout, format, and structure. Every application, programming language, and logging framework created logs that were verbose, yet easily parsable. Of course, we don’t live in this ideal world, and so we’re stuck with dozens or even hundreds of various log formats. While LogDNA supports a large number of common log formats, there are formats out there that our automatic parsing engine won’t recognize.

As part of our continuing security program here at BugSplat, we’re switching to an authentication service called Auth0 for all of our account logins. Auth0 is a universal authentication and authorization platform that supports customer-requested features like federated logins, which means authenticating with a different provider, and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) which is a two-step login protocol requiring separate verification from a mobile device to access your account.

In today’s interconnected world, API monitoring is vital. Businesses rely on data in everyday operations, and often rely on Web APIs to send and access data. But if an API is down, slow or not behaving as expected, it can severely impact business operations. Whether you’re an API provider or rely on third-party APIs, continually monitoring your API environment lets you know when there’s a problem.

When I tell people that Sentry is open source, they nod, understanding that this is known to be a good, noble thing. Then, they have questions. Many questions. “You mean open core?” they ask. No. Open source. “So you sell professional services?” No. Head scratching, then a pause. “Then… how do you make money?”

Many of my fellow engineers ask me what it means to be an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer). When I tell them it’s a type of DevOps engineer, they get a glazed look in their eyes and then ask what a DevOps engineer is. I then find myself googling both job titles and reading twelve very different definitions until I reach the conclusion that these definitions vary wildly from company to company and from team to team.

The other day the HB team was chatting and Ben, our dev-ops master, mentioned that he wished he'd used ULIDs instead of UUIDs for a particular system. Like any seasoned engineer, my reaction was to mumble something non-committal then sneak over to Google to try to figure out what the hell a ULID is. Two hours later I emerged with a thousand-yard stare and the realization that the world of unique identifiers is larger and more wondrous than I ever could have imagined.