We are pleased to announce the general availability of Elastic 7.9. This release brings a broad set of new capabilities to our Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, which are built on the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

In Elasticsearch 7.9, we’ll be introducing a new “wildcard” field type optimised for quickly finding patterns inside string values. This new field type addresses best practices for efficiently indexing and searching within logs and security data by taking a whole new approach to how we index string data. Depending on your existing field usage, wildcards can provide: The most exciting feature of this new data type is its simplification of partial matches.

KubeCon Europe 2020 is virtual this year, and Elastic is doing our part to help "keep cloud native connected." We would rather be there in person to shake hands, tell stories, and laugh, but the challenges of a virtual conference also provide the opportunity to share great content and materials that we might not be able to at a crowded booth.

Last month, members of the Elastic Security team hosted a threat hunting capture the flag (CTF) event at BSides SATX. We provided the community with an environment to learn and practice threat hunting with our team, and cultivated new relationships with attendees. By sharing information with security practitioners, we can help prepare them to defend their organization’s data from attack through knowledge transfer.

In the world of containers and Kubernetes, observability is crucial. Cluster administrators need visibility into the infrastructure and cluster operators need to know the status of their workloads at any given time. And in both cases, they need observability into moving objects. This is where Metricbeat and its autodiscover feature do the hard part for you.

In this blog, I will walk you through the process of configuring both Filebeat and Zeek (formerly known as Bro), which will enable you to perform analytics on Zeek data using Elastic Security. The default configuration for Filebeat and its modules work for many environments; however, you may find a need to customize settings specific to your environment.

The core responsibility of the UK's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is to maintain more than 48 million driver records, more than 40 million vehicle records, and to collect approximately £6 billion ($7.75 billion) a year in Vehicle Excise Duty. The agency is at the forefront of public digital services, and has made significant progress in transforming its IT systems into new cloud-based platforms.

In the world of IT, availability can mean a lot of things. Your website is available if it is up, responding in a timely manner, sending the correct headers, and serving a valid certificate. Your network is available if the correct hosts are online, responding to ICMP pings, and responding to TCP requests on specific ports. Your API endpoint is available if it returns the correct values when sent specific requests.