Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This blog post is for anyone needing a jumpstart into the world of Kusto. Perhaps you’ve heard about Kusto and are just curious. Maybe you’re just starting to use Azure Monitor for your application monitoring. You might even be getting skilled up in anticipation of the new Squared Up for Azure release that will have KQL at its heart. Whatever your reason, set aside the next 10 minutes and we'll get you up to speed with KQL. Ready? KQL stands for Kusto Query Language.

Load balancing, traffic management, authentication and authorization, service discovery — these are just some of the interactions taking place between microservices. Collectively called a “service mesh”, these interconnections can become an operations headache when handling large‑scale, complex applications. Istio seeks to reduce this complexity by providing engineers with an easy way to manage a service mesh.

In the last post, we talked about how Fastly, a content delivery network, provides a global infrastructure footprint to enterprises, and enables them to move apps and websites closer to their end users. Using Fastly CDN, they can serve content and deploy updates quickly, optimize web performance, and improve overall user experience. In this post, we will discuss how to collect, analyze, and monitor Fastly logs.

Logspout is an open source log router designed specifically for Docker container logs. If you’ve ever looked into log management for Docker, chances are you’ve heard of it. Logspout is a container that collects logs from all other containers running on the same host, then forwards them to a destination of your choice. This lets you send logs to an HTTP/S server, syslog server, or other endpoint without having to monitor files or modify your host systems.

Log management solutions can make it easy to filter, aggregate, and analyze your log data. Whether you leverage JSON format or process your logs in order to extract attributes, you can slice and dice your logs using the information they provide such as timestamp, HTTP status code, or database user. But different technologies and data sources often label similar information differently, making it difficult to aggregate data across multiple sources.

So far in this blog series, we’ve seen how Log360 is simple to get up and running, allows you to receive a central view of multiple environments, provides deep auditing capabilities across these environments, and comes with advanced security features to deal with all manner of security incidents. In the concluding post of this blog series, we’ll look at another highly essential component of SIEM solutions: integrated compliance management.

Monitoring backend issues is critical for ensuring that requests are handled in a timely manner, and validating that your services are accessible to users. But if you’re not tracking client-side errors and events to get visibility into the frontend, you won’t have any idea how often these issues prompt users to refresh the page—or worse, abandon your website altogether.

Launched at KubeCon North America last December, Loki is a Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes storage, search, and aggregation while making logs easy to explore natively in Grafana. Loki is designed to work easily both as microservices and as monoliths, and correlates logs and metrics to save users money. Less than a year later, Loki has almost 6,500 stars on GitHub and is now quickly approaching GA.

In part one of our introduction to NGINX “What is NGINX” , we went over the basic history of NGINX, the difference between Apache and NGINX, and why you would use NGINX over Apache in certain environments and web applications. Today we’ll be diving deeper into NGINX and going over topics such as web server performance, monitoring said performance, how to obtain and archive logs for deeper analysis, and how to even tell which web server you’re running on your environment.