Today, we delve into the art and science of Log Wrangling. This process involves corralling, organizing, and deriving maximum benefits from your logs like handling unpredictable livestock. Why do we do this? Managing logs can be challenging, but we can transform them from a daunting task with the correct approach into a beneficial tool… Graylog.

While no man is an island, your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is, except it’s a digital island floating in the ocean of a public cloud offered by a cloud service provider (CSP). The VPC means that everything on your digital island is yours, and none of the CSPs other customers can (or should be able to!) access it. You’ve likely been introduced to the shared security model, a sometimes-confusing way that organizations and their cloud-services providers (CSPs) split security responsibilities.

Search is a fundamental requirement for anyone working with log files. When you have terabytes and petabytes of data, you need to find answers to questions – fast. The search engine that you choose sits as the cornerstone for any technology that helps you look for the information needed to answer questions. While OpenSearch and Elasticsearch may have similar beginnings, their modern iterations have significant differences.

For organizations that leverage AWS resources, CloudWatch is a “must-have.” Operations teams leverage data from their AWS environments to identify service issues and maintain availability. By using CloudWatch and its associated products, organizations can monitor their AWS resource usage to optimize their environments.

One of the most important events you should be monitoring on your network is failed and successful logon events. What comes to most people’s minds when they think of authentication auditing is OS level login events, but you should be logging all authentication events regardless of application or platform. Not only should we monitor these events across our network, but we should also normalize this data so that we can correlate events between these platforms.

Parsers make it easier to dig deep into your data to get every byte of useful information you need to support the business. They tell Graylog how to decode the log messages that come in from a source, which is anything in your infrastructure that generates log messages (e.g., a router, switch, web firewall, security device, Linux server, windows server, an application, telephone system and so on).

Even before the push to the cloud, your company was a Microsoft shop. From workstations to servers, you’ve invested heavily in the Microsoft ecosystem because it gave your business all the technologies necessary for success. As part of your organization’s digital transformation strategy, Azure offered the easiest onboarding experience.

Organizations collect technologies like kids collecting baseball cards. As a company’s IT strategy matures, it adds new technologies to supplement previously existing ones, just like kids add new rookie cards to their collections of classics. While kids can leave their baseball cards randomly piled in a shoebox, organizations need to carefully identify and track their IT assets so that they can appropriately manage digital performance and cybersecurity.

Whether you’re a developer or a security analyst, you probably already know the name Docker. Developers use Docker’s open-source platform to build, package, and distribute their applications. Since the application and all dependencies sit in the container, it runs consistently across different operating systems and environments. As with everything technology, Docker adoption is a good news/bad news story. Good news: DevOps teams can ship applications faster.

Looking at your IT environment, you probably have various machines and applications connected to your networks. From network devices to servers to laptops, you need to know what’s happening at all times. While your log data provides the monitoring information you need, your environment’s diversity makes aggregating and correlating this information challenging. If your company invested in Windows devices, then your struggle is even more real because Microsoft uses proprietary format.