Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Log files are infamous for being “noisy”. Without the right management solution, trying to find a specific piece of information or using them to reproduce a critical error is a complex undertaking. If you’re working with CI/CD, how do you attribute new errors to a particular release? How do you investigate those errors and make sure that your customers aren’t being impacted? Faster releases mean shorter development and testing cycles before new code reaches production.

Watching too many movies might give you the impression that cyber attacks are launched by well-funded masterminds able to control the internet at their whim. But really, successful attacks can be as simple as disguising some malicious software as a link to an often-used site, and tricking people into clicking it, known as phishing. The result is that many cyber attacks are carried out by taking advantage of unsuspecting end users.

Working with Serverless computing is like riding an electric bike. You get speed, flexibility, automatic assistance to scale with ease. Development is usually hassle-free because you can focus on code and only pay for usage of the service. Except when your users hit an error. Debugging that issue feels like your bike’s battery just died while climbing a steep hill.

Hi, I’m Owen, one of the Loki maintainers, and I’m putting proverbial pen to paper to convince you why Loki is important. And this isn’t because it scales (it does) or because I work at Grafana Labs (I do). It’s because of the oft-overlooked and underrepresented organizational benefits. Organizational benefits?! What is this, some sort of cult? Why are you avoiding the technicals? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Now, hold on. The technicals are still valid.

Java is used by at least 7.6 Million developers worldwide. Java logging has been a staple of the Java platform since day one, boasting extensive, resourceful documentation and rich API’s. The cornerstone of monitoring your application is efficient and widespread logging. At Coralogix, we know that logs have become one of the most important components of a modern monitoring function.

In SCOM you can see the monitoring that generates your alerts (the contents of Health Explorer). While SCOM doesn’t always make it easy to get at the valuable context that this monitoring data provides, it is there and can help answer the "why" questions that often come up when looking at an alert in isolation.

Microservices and distributed architectures have become the norm for building modern day applications. While the cloud has made it easier to deploy and scale microservices, it has opened up a complex set of problems for DevOps by virtue of the sheer volume of interactions between those services.

Business-critical operations rely heavily on network performance. This means there’s a ton of pressure on IT teams to monitor the network effectively. There are numerous aspects to network monitoring, including virtual server monitoring, automation, baseline violation alerting, event logging, availability monitoring, and health monitoring.

Editor’s note: This post is a collaboration between Tim Tully, Splunk CTO, and Spiros Xanthos, Splunk’s vice president of product management for observability and IT Ops and previously the founder and CEO of Omnition. My love for the open-source software movement began with Linux in the ’90s and grew during my time at Yahoo! in the early days of Hadoop.