Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Javascript is a pretty prolific programming language, used daily by people visiting any number of websites and web applications. NodeJS, it’s server-side version, is also used all over the place. You’ll find it deployed as full application stacks to functions in things like AWS Lambda, or even as IoT processes with things like Johnny Five. So when we think about Observability in the context of a nodejs stack, how do we set it up and get the information flowing?

Watching too many movies might give you the impression that cyber attacks are launched by well-funded masterminds able to control the internet at their whim. But really, successful attacks can be as simple as disguising some malicious software as a link to an often-used site, and tricking people into clicking it, known as phishing. The result is that many cyber attacks are carried out by taking advantage of unsuspecting end users.

Grafana is the de facto open source tool for visualizing metrics. Grafana supports many different backends for data sources and handles each one slightly differently. This blog post is geared towards helping convert Grafana dashboards from using the Graphite backend to using Elasticsearch as a metrics datasource. There are many similarities between how to use both as datasources and how to plot graphs around them, but there are also many differences that need to be accounted for.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto industry standard for container orchestration. It provides the required abstraction for efficiently managing large-scale containerized applications with declarative configurations, an easy deployment mechanism, and both scaling and self-healing capabilities.

It’s that time of year again — the DevOps Pulse 2020 is here! Last year, nearly 1,000 engineers around the world provided their insights in the DevOps Pulse 2019 so we could get the community’s perspective on the growth and challenges associated with observability, cloud monitoring and more. As we discovered in last year’s DevOps Pulse, observability is still a major challenge for many organizations.

Cloud security is the combination of tools and procedures that form a defense against unauthorized data exposure by securing data, applications, and infrastructures across the cloud environment and by maintaining data integrity. To read more about the basic principles of cloud security, check out our previous article on the subject. Cloud security is a constant concern for R&D teams, and more and more methodologies are being introduced to help teams achieve their goals.

Oftentimes, security attacks that were clearly recorded in logs go unnoticed. They are obscured by a large sea of log data created by most modern cloud environments. In some cases, like during a DDoS attack, there will be a huge spike in logs so it will be very clear what happened. In other situations, just a few logs will document the attack. Finding these logs can be like finding a needle in a hay stack. But if you know what to looks for, it doesn’t need to be so hard to spot these attacks.

Java is a well-established object-oriented programming language that epitomizes cross-platform software development and helped to popularize the “write once, run anywhere” (WORA) concept. Java runs on billions of devices worldwide and powers a huge range of important software, such as the popular Android operating system and Elasticsearch. In this tutorial, we will go over how to manage Java logs with the ELK Stack and Logz.io.

Open source grafana is one of the most popular OSS UI for metrics and infrastructure monitoring today. Capable of ingesting metrics from the most popular time series databases, it’s an indispensable tool in modern DevOps. This OSS grafana tutorial will go over installation, configuration, queries, and initial metrics shipping. Open source grafana is the equivalent of what Kibana is for logs (for more, see Grafana vs. Kibana).