With millions of downloads for its various components since first being introduced, the ELK Stack is the world’s most popular log management platform. In contrast, Splunk — the historical leader in the space — self-reports 15,000 customers total. But what exactly is ELK, and why is the software stack seeing such widespread interest and adoption? Let’s take a deeper dive.

Kibana 6.3 was released a few weeks ago, together with new versions of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Beats, and despite the fact that this was not a major release, the new capabilities included in this version definitely deserve a close look.

We’re all collectively trying to define observability (“o11y,” pronounced “olly”) these days, and, as Honeycomb is sometimes described as an event-based observability product, trying to define all the other words that go around o11y at the same time.

TimeShift is turning 1 year old! I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading these weekly roundups as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. This week we have news on the new Grafana v5.2.0-beta3 release, a bunch of plugin updates to share, and your regular dose of recent blog posts.

A water and energy innovation company founded in 2005, Natel Energy builds hydropower turbines and designs resilient and distributed hydropower systems. In his talk at GrafanaCon EU, Natel Developer Ryan McKinley gave us a fascinating look at how the company is using Grafana to help run these next-generation power plants.

In our world of distributed systems, state changes to your infrastructure often take some time to propagate. With a few exceptions (for example, feature flags), single point in time changes are rare. Deploys, outages, database migrations, failovers, stress tests; none of these things are instantaneous – all have some duration during which the system is changing.

Getting the right information at the right time can be a difficult task in large corporate IT infrastructures. Whether you are dealing with a security issue or an operational outage, the right data is key to prevent further breakdowns. With central log management, security analysts or IT operators have a single place to access server log data. But what happens if the one log file that is urgently needed is not collected by the system?

The AWS marketplace gives users access to a large variety of SaaS and API products that can be easily found, subscribed to and used. One of the biggest advantages for users is the ability to benefit from an easier procurement and payment process — users can use their existing paying terms with AWS, and unify billing across all the AWS services they are consuming, including those offered in the marketplace. Logz.io is now available on the AWS SaaS Marketplace.