Searching and visualizing logs is next to impossible without log parsing, an underappreciated skill loggers need to read their data. Parsing structures your incoming (unstructured) logs so that there are clear fields and values that the user can search against during investigations, or when setting up dashboards. The most popular log parsing language is Grok. You can use Grok plugins to parse log data in all kinds of log management and analysis tools, including the ELK Stack and Logz.io.

We’ve got some outstanding news to share in the arena of security partnerships: Logz.io® Cloud-based SIEM has officially achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency! This designation within the Logging, Monitoring, SIEM, Threat Detection, and Analytics category further demonstrates Logz.io’s proven commitment to delivering best-in-class security.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice was established by Google nearly 20 years ago, and was popularized with Google’s monumental SRE Book. Everyone’s been attempting to follow that iconic path ever since.

So, you’ve decided to go with ELK to centralize, manage, and analyze your logs. Wise decision. The ELK Stack is now the world’s most popular log management platform, with millions of downloads per month. The platform’s open source foundation, scalability, speed, and high availability, as well as the huge and ever-growing community of users, are all excellent reasons for this decision.

On December 7, 2021, Amazon’s cloud services recently suffered a major outage that not only affected Amazon services, but also many third-party services we use day-to-day, including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Alexa, Amazon deliveries and Amazon Ring. Causes for the outage, which began at 7:30 am PST and lasted nearly seven hours, were detailed in a Root Cause Analysis report published by AWS that shed light on factors that may have contributed to the extended length of the disruption.

Some background. Having implemented at least 20 or more APM systems in production as an end-user at various companies, and both deployed and managed countless monitoring tools outside APM, I understand the role of the practitioner. Later on, I shifted to Gartner and led the APM Magic Quadrant for four years, finally spending another four years at AppDynamics (operating under Cisco after two years).

SaaS (software as a service) is the common model for many businesses today. Even longstanding behemoths such as Cisco and Microsoft have been strategically shifting their software products to SaaS and recurring revenue models (just think Office365 shift from licensed Office). These SaaS businesses need agility to move fast and remain competitive. This means agility in the IT stack, but also agility in the business models to support bottom-up GTM and product-led growth (PLG).

As an industry analyst at Gartner, we would often discuss whether people were in a centralized or decentralized cycle. In business, it’s normal to investigate options for creating innovation and moving quickly, or focus on reducing cost and optimizing teams and technologies.

The popularity of Prometheus speaks for itself. The project doesn’t post official numbers, but there are at least 500,000 companies using this project today as one of the most mature CNCF projects – one that has over 40k Github stars as of the writing of this blog. And since Prometheus is highly interoperable, compatibility is key. This comes into play not only with the exporters, but also with long-term storage options and alerting systems.