Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last month we launched the Elastic Contributor Program to recognize and reward the hard work of our awesome contributors, encourage knowledge sharing within the Elastic community, and build friendly competition around contributions. But how do you start contributing? In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to log in to the Elastic Contributor Program portal and set up your profile so you can begin submitting your own contributions and validating others’ contributions!

Every day we discover new vulnerabilities in our systems, cracks in the fence the adversaries take advantage of to get into your organization and wreak havoc. Understanding what you have in your environment (e.g., types of devices, systems equipment, etc.) is very important in order to make sure the controls in place are working and more importantly, keeping up with the threat landscape.

Making sense out of logs is not an easy task. Log management solutions, such as Sematext Cloud, gather and accept data from multiple sources. Those sources can have different log events structures, providing a different granularity. They may not follow common, logging good practices and be hard to get some meaning from. Because of that, it is important that the application we develop and follow best practices. One of those is keeping meaningful log levels.

The SolarWinds® Papertrail™ team is excited to announce SolarWinds rKubeLog, an open-source project designed to streamline Kubernetes logging. rKubeLog allows you to forward logs to Papertrail from within a Kubernetes cluster without using a daemon or setting up application-level logging or a logging sidecar. rKubeLog is a quick and easy way to implement logging for applications running in Kubernetes clusters.

As digital transformation accelerates across all industries, it has become increasingly important for businesses to get better, much better at the development and delivery of new software to drive revenue and engage customers in new ways. Ironically, most businesses are flying blind in how they track, benchmark and optimize their software development. Teams that consistently innovate and deliver new, high quality software quickly generate significant competitive advantage for their companies.

Platform architects, SREs, developers and DevOps staff for mission-critical modern apps know shaving 15 minutes off service incidents that take 20 minutes to resolve, four times a year, is the difference between meeting a 99.99% availability objective and missing it.

If you work in Information Technology, you have doubtless encountered logs- in fact depending on your area of expertise, you may be inundated with them on a daily basis. Nearly every piece of digital technology produces some kind of log, from complex web applications to the drivers that power your mouse and keyboard. As such, the definition of what a “log” actually is, is necessarily loose; any output received from a piece of software could be considered a log.

In Kibana you have a full selection of graphical representations for your data, most of the time this can be a simple line or bar charts to do what you need to do. But every so often you need to take a different view to get the most out of your data. Heatmaps are a critical component of the Kibana visualization arsenal, and deserve their own attention.

AWS Elasticsearch is a common provider of managed ELK clusters., but does the AWS Elasticsearch pricing really scale? It offers a halfway solution for building it yourself and SaaS. For this, you would expect to see lower costs than a full-blown SaaS solution, however, the story is more complex than that.

When I first started following Charity on Twitter back in early 2019, I was quickly overwhelmed by the new words and concepts she was discussing. I liked the results she described: faster debugging, less alert fatigue, happier users. Those are all things I wanted for my team! But I was hung up on these big polysyllabic words, which stopped me from taking those first steps toward improving our own observability.