We recently announced that users can find, deploy, and manage Elasticsearch from within the Azure portal. This new integration provides a simplified onboarding experience, all with the Azure portal and tooling you already know, so you can easily deploy Elastic without having to sign up for an external service or configure billing information.

We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of Elastic 7.13. This release brings a broad set of new capabilities to our Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, which are built into the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch and Kibana. This release enables customers to search petabytes of data in minutes cost-effectively by leveraging searchable snapshots and the new frozen tier.

It has been just over two years since we introduced the Elastic Common Schema (ECS), and what a journey it’s been. From categorization fields to request for comments to Threat Intelligence fields, ECS has evolved rapidly over the course of the last two years. In this blog post, I would like to reflect on the ECS journey so far, and look towards the future of ECS.

When it comes to malware attacks, one of the more common techniques is “living off the land” (LOtL). Utilizing standard tools or features that already exist in the target environment allows these attacks to blend into the environment and avoid detection. While these techniques can appear normal in isolation, they start looking suspicious when observed in the parent-child context. This is where the ProblemChild framework can help.

With the surge of endpoints and growing demands for access to data, public sector organizations have seen an increase in security threats since the onset of the pandemic. Against this backdrop, Elastic gathered industry leaders to learn how to manage these challenges and demands and build a path toward the future. The recent State and Local Government & Education ElasticON Public Sector event showcased the tech solutions that are delivering for constituents, faster.

Today I’m happy to share more about our partnership with Swimlane, which further reinforces our commitment to empowering security teams everywhere. Today’s security teams rely on the power of Elastic’s high-speed, cloud-scale analytics to solve their most complex and pressing security issues. Swimlane’s security automation platform provides a way for these same teams to accelerate and optimize their workflows for max efficiency and to solve SOAR use cases.

Elastic's new frozen data tier decouples compute from storage and leverages low-cost object stores such as Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or Amazon S3 to directly power searches. It provides unlimited scaling of storage while preserving the ability to efficiently query the data without any need to rehydrate it first, making it easier and cheaper to manage data at scale.

In a recent post we showed you how to get started with the free and open tier of Elastic Observability. Today we'll walk through what you need to do to expand your deployment so you can start gathering metrics from application performance monitoring (APM), or "tracing" data in your observability cluster, for free.