Here at Sematext we use Java and rely on Logsene, our hosted ELK logging SaaS, a lot. We like them so much that we regularly share our logging experience with everyone and help others with logging, especially, ELK stack. Centralized logging plays nice with Java (and anything else that can write pretty logs). However, there is one tricky thing that can be hard to get right: properly capturing exception stack traces.
Looking to learn about Logstash as quickly as possible? This article is for you: we’ll install Logstash and push some Apache logs to Elasticsearch in less than 5 minutes.
Containers are eating the world and the newly added Containers view in Sematext Cloud helps you manage that. You can experience container monitoring with the new Containers view that provides you with enhanced visibility into all your hosts and containers, drawing your attention to the ones that need it the most.
The popular Servers View has been overhauled. It’s both more modern looking and more powerful than the old version. Some things you can do with the new Servers view.
Logtrail is a popular Kibana plugin that makes Kibana look like Papertrail. Sematext’s Logtrail view in Kibana gives you the terminal-like experience of exploring logs without the pain of needing to ssh into machines. With Logtrail you can see new logs appearing at the bottom of the screen instead of the top screen, you can filter logs like with grep, and “jump” to different parts of the log stream like when using less.
The Linux Audit framework is a kernel feature (paired with userspace tools) that can log system calls. For example, opening a file, killing a process or creating a network connection. These audit logs can be used to monitor systems for suspicious activity.
“Why does the ‘docker logs’ command fail?“, is one of our frequently asked questions. The answer is simple and mentioned in the Docker documentation: “The docker logs command is not available for drivers other than json-file and journald.”
In the previous three parts of our OpenTracing series, we provided an Overview of OpenTracing, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve, we looked at Zipkin – a popular open-source distributed tracer and then at Jaeger – a newer open-source distributed tracer developed under the CNCF umbrella. In this blog post – the last part of the OpenTracing series – we will compare Jaeger vs. Zipkin side by side!
Elasticsearch comes with good out-of-the-box Garbage Collection settings. So good in fact that the Definitive Guide recommends not changing them. While we agree that most use-cases wouldn’t benefit from GC tuning, especially when it turns out there simply isn’t enough heap, there are exceptions. We found that G1 GC, for example, works well on big heaps. This allows you to have less, bigger nodes, which in turn means less network traffic in a large cluster.
In the previous two parts of OpenTracing series, we provided a good OpenTracing overview, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve and looked at Zipkin – a popular open-source distributed tracer. In this blog post, we will look at Jaeger, a newer open-source distributed tracer developed under the CNCF umbrella.
