Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2019

Chef Server Logging with the ELK Stack - Part 1

How many recipes do you have in your cookbook? This isn’t off topic, for today I’ll be exploring the ins and outs of Chef logging to help you maintain the state of your kitchen. (Last of the bad puns.) For those unfamiliar, Chef is a configuration management and platform automation tool that sits in the same space as Puppet (which we wrote about previously).

On-Prem or Cloud? A Decision in Light of Security and Compliance

When an organization is ready to deploy a new solution, or build a new system, there is often a continuing discussion about the relative merits of using the cloud versus deploying on-premises. While there are a number of aspects that play into this decision, it is not always clear which is the better solution for security and compliance. Typically, deployment issues are not clear because security and compliance solutions quickly change when you are using shared vs. dedicated environments.

Nanoservices vs. Microservices

Software often seems like a benign version of Game of Thrones, in which any dominant or ascending technology/methodology is constantly challenged by newer and more attractive rivals. So as soon as microservices entered the mainstream, it didn’t take long until some developers saw it as flawed, and proposed nanoservices as a replacement. In this article, we ask why the move to breaking down software into smaller and smaller pieces is a good idea.

How to Install the ELK Stack on AWS: A Step-By-Step Guide

The ELK Stack is a great open-source stack for log aggregation and analytics. It stands for Elasticsearch (a NoSQL database and search server), Logstash (a log shipping and parsing service), and Kibana (a web interface that connects users with the Elasticsearch database and enables visualization and search options for system operation users). With a large open-source community, ELK has become quite popular, and it is a pleasure to work with.

GoT Predictions: How we Analyzed Twitter to Find Who will Win the Iron Throne

With the final season of Game of Thrones premiering just last night, the question on the mind of every super fan is who will finally rise to the iron throne? To find the answer, we used Twitter along with our machine data analytics platform to check the popularity of specific characters and how often they are mentioned alongside the term “iron throne”.

The Top 5 Open-Source NIDS Solutions

In a hyper-connected world, the threat landscape is undoubtedly evolving. Ensuring the security of your enterprise networks on a daily basis is essential to protect your business, no matter how big (or small) it is. According to SophosLabs’ 2019 threat report, one dangerous ransomware called SamSam cost companies $6.5 million ($10K to $50K per ransom).

What's New in Elastic Stack 6.7

In the midst of all the turmoil and debate around Open Distro for Elasticsearch, Elastic continues to produce, and last week announced both a new major release of the Elastic Stack — version 6.7 (and also the first release candidate for 7.0!). As usual, I’ve put together a brief overview of the main features introduced. One change I’ve applied this time is adding a comment for each feature detailing what license it falls under.

Installing the EFK Stack with Kubernetes with GKE

The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) is the weapon of choice for many Kubernetes users looking for an easy and effective way to gain insight into their clusters, pods and containers. The “L” in “ELK” has gradually changed to an “F” reflecting the preference to use Fluentd instead of Logstash and making the “EFK Stack” a more accurate acronym for what has become the de-facto standard for Kubernetes-native logging.

Monitoring AWS EC2 with Metricbeat, the ELK Stack and Logz.io

Amazon EC2 is the cornerstone for any Amazon-based cloud deployment. Enabling you to provision and scale compute resources with different memory, CPU, networking and storage capacity in multiple regions all around the world, EC2 is by far Amazon’s most popular and widely used service.