Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Some things just go better together. Like barbeque and blues, sunsets and beaches, cheese and fine wine — hey, even software and superheroes go better together! That’s why in this blog we are going to look at why IT Operations and Observability just go better together, through a superhero analogy. Enter the Dark Knight himself — Batman! He will represent observability. IT Operations will be represented by Lucius Fox.

There’s an old saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t ring true when it comes to data breaches and ransomware attacks. High profile security incidents continue to make headlines, and those headlines are impacting bottom lines. In response to these, the US federal government is modernizing its own cybersecurity infrastructure, and more state governments are implementing laws to protect citizens.

The massive proliferation of log data forces teams to manage the costs to process, route, and store it. Teams need access to this data to gain critical insights into their services, but for many organizations this presents a challenge for their budget. Logging can get expensive, fast, which often results in teams making difficult tradeoffs between aggregating enough logging information to be useful and controlling the cost of storing all those logs.

Apache Cassandra is a distributed database known for its high availability, fault tolerance, and near-linear scaling. It was initially developed by Facebook, but it is a widely used open-source system used by the largest tech companies in the world. There are numerous reasons behind its popularity, including no single point of failure, exceptional horizontal scaling with a data layout designed as a perfect fit for time-series data.

Many devices—such as switches, routers, firewalls, servers, and printers—support syslog protocol. This standard for sending log messages within a network offers critical information about your system. Consequently, monitoring your network and its syslog messages should be a top priority. Many IT professionals use log and syslog monitors or viewers to gather logs and syslog messages from across their network in a centralized location.

New Relic recently published a survey on the observability projections and trends for the year 2021. At observIQ, an emerging platform of choice in the observability space, we decided to give our users a rundown on what we agreed and disagreed within their survey results.

When we launched LM Logs in November of 2020, we knew the product would aid in reducing troubleshooting time and identifying root causes to enable a more proactive approach to not only monitoring and planning, but also taking action. After talking with our customers and understanding what they needed in order to accelerate their business transformation, we focused on a few key enhancements in Q3. TL;DR – Lumber Bob highlights the top features: Want the long version?

Organizations are constantly trying to maintain pace with users' expectations and desires from a digital experience. These users expect an experience that constantly changes based on their preferences and behavior, which means innovating quickly and improving software is critical to user happiness and driving business success.

Logs play a key role in understanding your system’s performance and health. Good logging practice is also vital to power an observability platform across your system. Monitoring, in general, involves the collection and analysis of logs and other system metrics. Log analysis involves deriving insights from logs, which then feeds into observability. Observability, as we’ve said before, is really the gold standard for knowing everything about your system.