On April 24, 2024, Francis Odum, released his research report titled, “The Evolution of the Modern Security Data Platform” in The Software Analyst Newsletter. This report examines the evolution of modern security operations, tracing its evolution from a reactive approach to a proactive approach. It highlights the shift towards automation, threat intelligence integration, and controlling the costs of ingesting and storing data as crucial elements in enhancing cyber defense strategies.

In the complex world of modern distributed systems, observability is vital. Observability allows engineers to understand what's happening within their systems, debug issues rapidly, and proactively ensure optimal application performance. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful, vendor-neutral solution to address the challenges of observability across different technologies and environments.

CloudTrail logs are a type of log generated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of its CloudTrail service. AWS CloudTrail records API calls made within an AWS account, providing a history of activity including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. For example, CloudTrail events are generated for actions such as EC2 instances start/stop, S3 bucket read/write and IAM user creation/deletion.