Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2020

Distributed tracing analysis backend that fits your needs

I am spending a considerable amount of time recently on distributed tracing topics. In my previous blog, I discussed different pros and cons of various approaches to collecting distributed tracing data. Right now I would like to draw your attention to the analysis back-end: what does it take to be good at analyzing transaction traces?

Deploying AWS Microservices

There has been increasing buzz in the past decade about the benefits of using a microservice architecture. Let’s explore what microservices are and are not, as well as contrast them with traditional monolithic applications. We’ll discuss the benefits of using a microservices-based architecture and the effort and planning that are required to transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture.

Sumo Logic and ZeroFOX Join Forces to Improve Visibility and Protect your Public Attack Surface

Today’s organizations have the challenge of managing several different applications and software within their technology stack. The more public-facing platforms an organization utilizes, the greater their public attack surface risks. Without proper protection, they and their community can become an easy target for malicious actors.

Microservices vs. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Technology has a way of circling around to the same ideas over time, but with different approaches that learn from previous iterations. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Microservices Architecture (MSA) are such evolutionary approaches. Where lessons learned made sense, they were reused; and where painful lessons were learned, new methods and ideas were introduced.

Announcing new Sumo Logic dashboards

We’re excited to announce the first version release of our new dashboard framework: Dashboard (New). Built on top of a scalable, flexible, and extensible charting system, the new dashboards provide customers with deep control over their visuals, enable metadata rich workflows, and create dashboards in a dashboard first GUI.

Reduce AWS bills with aws-nuke

Many of the organizations use AWS as their cloud infrastructure, and in general they have multiple AWS accounts for production, staging, and development. Inevitably, this would result in losing track of various experimental AWS resources instantiated by your developers. Eventually, you will be paying AWS bills for resources which could have been identified and deleted in time. So, how should you go about identifying and deleting such unnecessary resources? aws-nuke to the rescue.

What Data Types to Prioritize in Your SIEM

Customers regularly ask me what types of data sources they should be sending to their SIEMs to get the most value out of the solution. The driver for these conversations is often because the customers have been locked into a SIEM product where they have to pay more for consumption. More log data equals more money and, as a result, enterprises have to make a difficult choice around what log sources and data are what they guess is the most important.

Cloud SIEM: Getting More Out of Your Threat Intelligence - 3 Use Cases for IOCs

Ever since JASK was founded, we have heavily integrated with threat intelligence platforms to gain context into attacker activity through indicators of compromise (IOCs). Now that we have joined Sumo Logic, our customers have the ability to pull in more data than ever making this feature even more powerful. One of our tightest integrations is with the Anomali (formerly ThreatStream) platform.

Continuous Intelligence: Why it's even more important post-pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a business discontinuity in which digital transformation has gone from evolution to explosion overnight--doubling, tripling and quadrupling cloud application and infrastructure workloads. As these digital businesses and services scale to meet demand, the need to effectively monitor, troubleshoot and secure these services has never been more dependent on the need to collect, index and analyze all data in real time to speed response, improve services and remain agile under these conditions to drive better outcomes.

The automation hype is real for SOC teams: unpacking the Dimensional Research "2020 State of SecOps and Automation" report

As more and more enterprises shift to the cloud, the pressure on SOC teams to protect them against threats rises exponentially. They are the very first line of defense against data breaches and cyber threats that become more frequent and more sophisticated.

Building a Security Practice Powered by Cloud SIEM

It has never been a more challenging (or better) time to be a service provider for managed security services. With an estimated 1,200+ vendors selling a variety of security solutions today, businesses are looking for help to manage the complexities of supporting these technologies while protecting critical data.

Distributed Tracing & Logging - Better Together

Monitoring requires a multi-faceted approach if DevOps teams want end-to-end visibility and deep insight into issues. This is especially true in the case of modern microservices applications, which are essentially collections of distributed services that talk to each other over a service mesh. With monolithic applications, requests can be tracked easily from the client to the server and back, but with modern applications, every request passes through numerous services before completion.

Defense in depth: DoublePulsar

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you are probably familiar with the recent Shadow Brokers data dump of the Equation Group tools. In that release a precision SMB backdoor was included called Double Pulsar. This backdoor is implemented by exploiting the recently patched Windows vulnerability: CVE-2017-0143. For detection, we are going to first focus on the backdoor portion of the implant, hunting for traces left behind on the network.

Improving Application Quality through Log Analysis

Throughout the history of software development, one statement has remained true: no application is perfect. Due to that fact, development organizations must work with all resources at their disposal to limit the impact that application problems have on the end-user. Server log files represent an important resource that should be referred to during the process for troubleshooting any application issue.

Domain Hijacking Impersonation Campaigns

A number of domain “forgeries” or tricky, translated look-alikes have been observed recently. These attack campaigns cleverly abuse International Domain Names (IDN) which, once translated into ASCII in a standard browser, result in the appearance of a corporate or organization name that allows the targeting of such organization’s domains for impersonation or hijacking. This attack has been researched and defined in past campaigns as an IDN homograph attack.