Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2018

ELMAH Is Dead. Get More Detailed Exceptions With Retrace

For many years, ELMAH was the go-to logging utility for ASP.NET. It caught exceptions that came up through the IIS response pipeline and logged them along with contextual information. It also put a subpage on your site that you could visit to view logged exceptions. It was a great tool for catching, logging, and viewing unhandled exceptions for monolithic ASP.NET applications. But now that we’ve moved to distributed application architectures, we need something more.

Top Use Cases for Log Analysis

Investing in a log analysis tool provides many benefits: it saves time needed to detect and troubleshoot a problem, reduces churn by providing a better user experience, and improves system security. There is a wide scope of use cases for log analysis - from tackling security and performance issues head-on to enhancing the quality of your services. What are some of the most common use cases for log file analysis?

LogDNA Announces New Log Management Capabilities on IBM Cloud

LogDNA today announced a new offering that enables developers to troubleshoot coding bugs and quickly fix development errors in applications, potentially saving businesses millions of dollars in development hours, downtime and associated revenue loss. IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA integrates LogDNA services to allow developers to aggregate all their log data across applications in the IBM Cloud.

What's New in Elastic Stack 6.5

Elastic Stack 6.5 is out! Every new version of the Elastic Stack is packed with new features and updates, and as always, I’m happy to dive a bit deeper into the new release to provide our readers with a wrap up of what’s new. Interestingly enough, and as reflected in the announcements surrounding this release, this release is all about Kibana. That’s not to say the other components in the stack were left out – to the contrary, and I will cover them all, don’t you worry.

Access Logs Analyzer - Analyzing Website Performance in No Time

Website performance is a burning issue that matters to any IT professional who is responsible for the company’s website. Access logs performance analysis is used for analyzing all access logs for website performance: slow page load time, most frequent web pages and their errors, large web pages issues and more.

How to Choose the Right Log Analysis Tool for Your Enterprise

In the digital era, we need to track and record all of our data at all times. From a user logging into the dashboard to database queries, JavaScript errors, and website traffic, everything that matters is recorded in a log. You name it, and with due probability, you already have time-stamped documentation of all the events saved somewhere in the form of a log.

A re:Invent to Remember-What to Expect at AWS re:Invent 2018

Every year, we take time out of our everyday activities to join thousands of techies just like us for the biggest event of the season–AWS re:Invent. For one week at the end of November, industry leaders gather in Las Vegas to learn about new technologies from AWS as well as other partners in the cloud, DevOps, and IT spaces. The new technology, innovative ideas, and smart, ambitious people we have met over the past few years have been priceless for all of us at Logz.io.

Microservice Logging: Challenges, Advantages, and Handling Failures

One of the major developments in software design and delivery over the last few years has been a movement away from monolith applications towards microservices. One of the sticking points I’ve seen on numerous microservice applications is logging. There are some unique challenges with microservice logging that need to be addressed. In this article, we’ll look at how we can make logging in a microservice as painless as in a monolith.

Must-Have Features for Your Log Management Software

With so many choices available to us today, choosing log management software that’s just right for us has never been simpler. That is, if you know exactly what it is you are looking for. But for many users, the sheer amount of computer programs that perform the same tasks, and seem so similar(sometimes almost identical) to each other, can quickly become off-putting and confusing.

An Organized Workflow for Prototyping

In the world of agile there’s a demand to solve grey areas throughout the design process at lightning speed. Prototypes help the scrum team test ideas and refine them. Without prototypes, we can’t test ideas until the feature or product has been built which can be a recipe for disaster. It’s like running a marathon without training.

Apache Kafka Tutorial - Use Cases & Challenges Logging at Scale

Organizations that handle logging at scale eventually run into the same problem: too many events are being generated, and logging components can’t keep up. Even with persistent queues and other mitigating features enabled, there’s simply not enough of a buffer between log generators and log ingesters to handle the volume of log lines coming in.

Setting Up Application Performance Monitoring with the ELK Stack and Logz.io

Application Performance Monitoring, aka APM, is one of the most common methods used by engineers today to measure the availability, response times and behavior of applications and services. There are a variety of APM solutions in the market but if you’re familiar with the ELK Stack or are a Logz.io user, this article describes using a relatively new open source-based solution — Elastic APM.

Java Logs: 4 Types of Logs You Need to Know

Logging is an important topic in software development, especially if you need to analyze bugs and other unexpected events in your production environment. Implementing your logging often seems easy. But as you probably experienced yourself, logging is far more complex than it might seem. That’s why you can find lots of articles about it here on the blog.

Why is Log Management Important

Ever since humankind developed the ability to write, much of our progress has been made thanks to recording and using data. In ages long past, notes were made on the production and gathering of resources, the exact number of available soldiers and other important personnel, and were compiled and stored by hand. Because of this documentation method, important information was also prone to being misplaced, lost, or even mishandled.

Container Logging & Devops: the Future of Kubernetes Integration

I hosted a webinar where I covered why logging is important, how to choose a logging provider. And then shared our experience of setting up logging on Kubernetes containers, the Kubernetes logging framework and the logging best practices we’ve implemented internally and supported our customers who run Kubernetes in production.

Building a resilient cybersecurity strategy for 2019 - Part 1

This ManageEngine Webinar series introduces industry best practices required to be followed in 2019. The importance of privileged access to critical information and data loss prevention (DLP) against insider threats will be discussed. It will also highlight the rising significance of Unified Endpoint Security and Management, trends in Log Management, compliance standards.

Logz.io - Who We Are and What We Do

Logz.io is an intelligent log analytics platform that combines the popular ELK stack as a cloud service and sophisticated machine learning. Logz.io derives insights from machine data, user behavior and community knowledge in a scalable, production-ready platform that enables organizations to resolve issues faster and take operations to the next level.

AWS GuardDuty Monitoring with Logz.io Security Analytics and the ELK Stack

Last month, we announced Logz.io Security Analytics — a security app built on top of the ELK Stack, offering out-of-the-box security features such as threat intelligence, correlation, and premade integrations and dashboards. In this article, I’d like to show an example of using both the ELK Stack and Logz.io Security Analytics to secure an AWS environment.

Server Log Files in a Nutshell

Servers take a lot of requests daily, we know that…We also know that the server responds instantly. But who makes the request? What do they want, and what exactly are they looking for? Where do these visitors come from? How often they are making a request: once a month, once a day, almost every minute? Well, answers to these, and potentially a lot more questions, can be found in a single place - the server log file.

Introducing Custom Parsing on LogDNA: A dead simple way to define your own log parsing rules

We’re excited to announce that LogDNA’s built-in log parser offers custom parsing, now available in beta. This means you can now use our step-by-step wizard to wrangle non-standard log formats and run custom transformations on your logs, allowing you to easily search and graph log lines that were previously off limits. The best part is, it’s a simple three step process: search, extract, validate… done!

SLF4J: 10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using It

One of the most important aspects of developing an efficient system is to have clean, helpful logs that will help you understand what errors are being triggered, and what information is being processed. When you are first creating an application, you might not know what logging framework will be most suitable for your future needs, or you could simply want your system to remain agnostic regarding the logging implementation to be used.

Near Real-Time Log Collection From Amazon S3 Storage

We are very excited to announce a new capability for our Amazon S3 sources. Until recently, the only method Sumo Logic used for discovering new data in an S3 bucket was periodic polling. However, with our new notification-based approach, users can now configure S3 sources such that Sumo Logic is notified immediately (via AWS SNS) whenever a new item is added to an S3 bucket, eliminating the need to wait for new objects to be discovered via periodic polling.

Announcing Advanced On-Premise and Multi-Cloud Logging Platforms

We’re excited to announce the general availability of our new On-Prem, Self-Hosted, and Multi-Cloud logging platforms. Our customers will have the capability to log data in their infrastructure of choice. Whether across multiple public/private clouds or within a customer’s own data center, logs can be viewed through a unified interface while addressing any data locality and performance requirements.

Logs for Dogs: Automating Infrastructure, Scaling, Deployment, Logging and Alerting at Wag!

Looking for best practices to keep on top of the availability of your application in the cloud and keep your customers happy? Come and listen to Dave Bullock, Software Engineer and Architect at Wag!, as he recounts his team’s journey. Wag has radically improved their infrastructure and visibility into their systems and application with a combination of Terraform and Sumo Logic.

Devops Observability: The Evolution of Logging, Monitoring and Metrics (Webinar)

Recently, we held a webinar where Chris Nguyen, our CEO and Co-Founder and Norman Hsieh, our Head of Business Development talked about the ever increasing production of data, the shift from monitoring to observability, and the evolution of production infrastructure into multi-cloud. LogDNA is uniquely positioned to have enabled thousands of customers to gain deep insights into their evolving DevOps infrastructure.

Types of Log Management Tools and How to Choose the Best Solution

As any business running microservices, containerized applications, networking devices, or multiple servers knows, it’s important to get a centralized log management system that fits your company’s unique needs. The best log management solution should empower your business to gain insights, resolve production issues quickly, streamline your DevOps and IT teams, and allow you to work more efficiently.

New Free App for Active Directory

In organizations which uses a Windows server environment, the vast majority of authentication and access control processes are managed within Active Directory. As a central and critical component for managing organizational IT resources, Active Directory logs contain valuable information which must be closely monitored and analyzed.

Monitoring and Logging Requirements for Compliance

Addressing compliance requirements for monitoring and logging can be a challenge for any organization no matter how experienced or skilled the people responsible are. Compliance requirements are often not well understood by technical teams and there is not much instruction on how to comply with a compliance program. In this article, we’ll discuss what some of these new compliance programs mean, why they are important, and how you can comply with your logging and monitoring system.

The True Cost of the ELK Stack

Despite having an extensive feature set and being open source, organizations are beginning to realize that a free ELK license is not free after all. Rather, it comes with many hidden costs due to hardware requirements and time constraints that easily add to the total cost of ownership (TCO). Here, we uncover the true cost of running the Elastic Stack on your own vs using a hosted log management service.

Monitoring and Logging for Docker Enterprise Edition

In this reference architecture document, you will find out about all key Docker metrics to watch. Following that, you will learn how to set up monitoring and logging for a Docker UCP cluster. Specifically, this e-book shows how to use Sematext Docker Agent to collect metrics, events and logs for all Docker hosts and containers. Enjoy and share!