Observability Pipelines have become vital tools for DevOps and Security teams to manage, control, store, route, and optimize telemetry data analyzed by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and Log management platforms. These teams spend hours every week trying to fit an increasingly large volume of data into the same size box.

As a pivotal element within your networking configuration, logs generated by Network Firewalls hold immense importance from both security and compliance standpoints. These logs serve as a source of valuable information, encompassing records of network traffic details like source and destination IP addresses, ports, protocols, timestamps, and the actions (e.g., allowed or denied) taken by the firewall for each connection or packet.

A large North American hospital system saw rapid increases in its Microsoft Azure Sentinel SIEM expenses primarily due to the escalating growth of security telemetry data. Their primary data sources were Fortinet Firewall logs, Windows Event Logs, Active Directory, Domain Controller, and DNS logs.

An Observability Pipeline is a transformative tool for managing complex system data, optimizing security, and enhancing performance within budget. Observo.ai revolutionizes this with AI, slashing costs and streamlining data analysis to empower Security and DevOps teams.

Welcome to Observability 101, the comprehensive guide from Observo.ai, unveiling the mysteries of observability in 38 insightful chapters. Have you ever wanted to know something specific about observability but were afraid to ask? Fear not, this series is designed to be your go-to resource, answering all of the questions you might have.

A Global 1000 E-commerce company struggled with the rapid growth in telemetry data that their security team analyzes with Splunk, Grafana, and other Observability tools in the cloud. Specifically, the increase in VPC Flow log and Firewall log volumes caused a spike in Splunk costs on certain data sets and triggered daily indexing limit overage fees. As this deluge of data began piling up in block storage within their Splunk index, the team saw corresponding spikes in storage costs.

A large, global Data Management and AI software company with over 5,000 customers across more than 100 countries had seen unprecedented growth (more than 30% year over year) in telemetry data from their multi-cloud infrastructure being sent to the Elasticsearch Observability and SIEM Platform. The growth of this data contributed to a multi-million dollar price tag for Elasticsearch.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) VPC Flow Logs is a feature designed to capture and provide information about the IP traffic that flows to and from network interfaces within your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This data can be published to various destinations, including AWS CloudWatch Logs, AWS S3, or AWS Kinesis Data Firehose. Flow logs serve several important purposes, such as diagnosing security group rule issues, monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic, and determining traffic directions.

A firewall is a network security device or software that is used to monitor and control incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. Firewall Logs contain valuable information about network and security events. These logs are essential for security and infrastructure monitoring for enterprises. While this data is critical to securing enterprise networks, they are also one of the most voluminous data types security teams use to monitor and secure their networks.