According to Statistia, the total number of data breaches reached an all-time high of 3,205 in 2023, affecting more than 350 million individuals worldwide. These breaches primarily occurred in the Healthcare, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Professional Services, and Technology sectors. The mishandling of sensitive log data provides an on-ramp to many of the most common attack vectors.

Turning logs into metrics isn’t a new concept. A version of this functionality is implemented in most agents, visualization tools, and backends. It’s everywhere because converting logs to metrics has many practical applications and is one of the fundamental mechanisms for controlling log volume in a telemetry pipeline. In this post, I’ll briefly overview log-based metrics, explain why they matter, and provide examples of how to build them using OpenTelemetry and BindPlane OP.

At observIQ, we are big believers and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In 2023, we noticed project awareness reached an all-time high as we attended trade shows like KubeCon and Monitorama. The project’s benefits of flexibility, performance, and vendor agnosticism have been making their rounds; we’ve seen a groundswell of customer interest.

At observIQ, we’re constantly shipping new features to help users get the most out of BindPlane. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of all the BindPlane news, updates, and improvements you should know about.

At observIQ, we’ve seen continuous customer interest in scalable and performant observability solutions for Windows environments. As of 2023, Windows is estimated to be deployed to 75% of desktops worldwide. Unsurprisingly, we commonly speak to CTOs, DevOps, and IT managers responsible for managing fleets of thousands of Windows-based end-user and point-of-sale systems in the Financial, Healthcare, Insurance, and Education sectors.