Today we are releasing Graylog v2.4.5 to fix a few bugs. We have also fixed an Elasticsearch credentials issue found by Defence Logic Limited - thanks for finding this and responsibly disclosing it.

Splunk helps IT operations (ITOps) teams simultaneously reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR) and drive collaboration. To better understand Splunk, let’s take a closer look at the software platform, how it works and its benefits.

Let me preface this article with a quick customer story. I was recently talking with the director of operations of a G2000 company and he asked in a nice, but pointed way: “All I want is a SaaS software solution to manage my applications. Why does the architecture of the software matter?”. At Sumo Logic, we couldn’t agree and disagree more.

We’ve all been there — you’re on-call, fast asleep at 3 AM when suddenly, in comes the alerts–in overdrive. Your system is notifying you of some sort of abnormal behavior, but with all the alerts and data coming through, its difficult to figure out what your system is trying to tell you. Is there potential malicious behavior? Did someone write faulty code? Is it an important issue or can it wait? Is it nothing at all?

Logs contain some of the most valuable data available to developers, DevOps practitioners, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and security teams, particularly when troubleshooting an incident. It’s not always easy to extract and use, though. One common challenge is that many log entries are blobs of unstructured text, making it difficult to extract the relevant information when you need it.

What the Beats family of log shippers are to Logstash, so Fluent Bit is to Fluentd — a lightweight log collector, that can be installed as an agent on edge servers in a logging architecture, shipping to a selection of output destinations.

Elasticsearch comes with good out-of-the-box Garbage Collection settings. So good in fact that the Definitive Guide recommends not changing them. While we agree that most use-cases wouldn’t benefit from GC tuning, especially when it turns out there simply isn’t enough heap, there are exceptions. We found that G1 GC, for example, works well on big heaps. This allows you to have less, bigger nodes, which in turn means less network traffic in a large cluster.

In a world where IT infrastructure becomes more complex with each additional layer, knowing what is happening in your infrastructure becomes more complicated every day.