I can’t believe that OpenObservability Talks podcast is already celebrating its second anniversary. It feels like just yesterday I wrote the summary of the summary of the first year, sharing the hectic times of starting a podcast in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The pandemic has been with us most of this year too, but it didn’t stop us from bringing the latest on the best of breed open source observability.

I’m thrilled to announce today that Logz.io has been named a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability. Gaining this recognition from these leading industry experts, in my opinion, is an outstanding accomplishment for our entire organization – the product of years of hard work and putting the needs of our 1,300-plus customers first.

Monitoring is often not the first thing on the mind of the modern developer. Yet, it’s necessary at many points of the software development lifecycle, including: before deprecating an API, before launching a new feature, after launching the feature, and more. In fact, monitoring needs can vary much more than the classic Ops monitoring. My podcast guest Liran Haimovitch is the co-founder and CTO of Rookout, a live data collection and debugging platform.

On May 27, 2022, an interesting Microsoft Word doc was uploaded to VirusTotal by an independent security research team called nao_sec. The Word doc contains built-in code that calls an HTML file from a remote source that in-turn executes more (malicious) code and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint misses detection. Two days later, May 29, Kevin Beaumont publishes an article describing the behavior of this Word doc, and deems this a new 0-day vulnerability in Office/Windows products.

From the moment Elastic announced plans to abandon a pure open source license for its Elasticsearch engine and Kibana dashboards in early 2021, there’s been a massive effort underway to create clear alternatives for the global community of active users. Logz.io has been an outspoken advocate and contributor to this work – fully embracing it as part of our product roadmap to best serve the needs of our customers, and preserve our long-term commitment to open source observability.

In this tutorial, we will go through a working example of a NestJS application auto-instrumented with OpenTelemetry. In our example we will use a simple application that outputs “Hello World!” when we call it in the browser. We will instrument this application with OpenTelemetry’s Node.js client library to generate trace data and send it to an OpenTelemetry Collector. The Collector will then export the trace data to an external distributed tracing analytics tool of our choice.

After creating your Logz.io account, the first step for onboarding is to send you log, metric, and trace data. Logz.io makes this flexible – allowing for multiple ways to get data into your Logz.io account depending on your use case and technology stack. Today, we’re excited to announce another easy and fast way to get AWS metric data into Logz.io: by setting up a CloudWatch metrics stream and a Kinesis Firehose.

Regardless of economic conditions, IT usually operates under an axiom no one in business ever likes to hear: “We have to do more with less.” Doing more with less is essentially the default position for IT, but when it comes to security operations, that position can have real consequences.

When you migrated critical infrastructure to the cloud, what were your goals and expectations? Odds are, you hoped leaving on-premises infrastructure would produce significant organizational benefits. You probably figured you’d streamline operations and reduce management overhead. You felt you’d have an easier time meeting business goals. Perhaps most important of all, you likely expected your environment would become less complex, and even cost less to operate.