In Elasticsearch parlance, a document is serialized JSON data. In a typical ELK setup, when you ship a log or metric, it is typically sent along to Logstash which groks, mutates, and otherwise handles the data, as defined by the Logstash configuration. The resulting JSON is indexed in Elasticsearch.

Emails are one of the most popular notification methods of Opsgenie when reaching out to your users. Now, you can create Email Templates which represent your company’s style and streamline communication processes! Email Templates are available for the emails sent out for Mass Notifications and Stakeholder Notifications, and you can customize of the content of the emails depending on your needs.

Eating your own dog food is a concept also referred to as dogfooding. This is when a company uses its own product which was made famous by Google and Microsoft who employ the tactic to test their products in real-world usage. Dogfooding can act as quality control, and can also be a kind of testimonial advertising. For leaders, it’s a way to truly understand what you have, help you set your future direction and understand the challenges your team face on a day to day basis.

It might surprise you that the version of cron that runs on your server today is largely compatible with the crontab spec written in the 1970s. One downside of this careful backwards compatibility is that jobs, even on the same server, can be created and scheduled differently.

This recipe is similar to the previous rsyslog + Redis + Logstash one, except that we’ll use Kafka as a central buffer and connecting point instead of Redis. You’ll have more of the same advantages.

Starting from Elasticsearch 5.0, you’re able to define pipelines within it that process your data, in the same way you’d normally do it with something like Logstash. We decided to take it for a spin and see how this new functionality (called Ingest) compares with Logstash filters in both performance and functionality. Is it worth sending data directly to Elasticsearch or should we keep Logstash?

It seems like every year, there’s a trendy new business model that managed services providers (MSPs) are told to adopt if you want to, well, survive. The most obvious example in 2018 is security. Cybercrime is a hot topic at channel conferences, and vendors are offering content in droves to help MSPs package and sell managed security services with the promise it’ll help you better protect your customers—and your business.

One of the single biggest issues that Citrix administrators are forced to deal with is the sheer complexity of their Citrix systems. Not only is there complexity associated with the Citrix software itself, but the Citrix software also has a dependency upon a number of supporting infrastructure components. All of this complexity can make troubleshooting extraordinarily difficult whenever problems arise. An inexperienced administrator may not even know where to start.

Since its first release in 2007, Splunk quickly became one of the leading log management solutions. Its focus on enterprise grade log analysis and security incident and event management (SIEM) made it the de facto choice for organizations generating large volumes of log files and machine data. But over the past decade, the log management landscape has changed drastically.

In the past, applications would be deployed by installation on a host, using the operating system package manager. This was a heavy solution with tremendous reliance on the operating system package manager and increased complexity with libraries, configuration, executables and so on all interconnected. Then came containers. Containers are small and fast, and are isolated from each other and from the host.