Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hashicorp Vault is an open-source secret management tool that allows organizations to easily "secure, store and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API." This solution prevents sensitive information from being stored in unsecured places, and at times stored in plaintext, throughout the organization’s infrastructure.

Today we are officially releasing Graylog v3.1.1 This release brings a whole new AWS Kinesis/CloudWatch Input to Graylog. The new input guides the user through the setup process and performs validation checks along the way. It also supports an automated CloudWatch Logs to Kinesis Streams setup, eliminating the complexity of manual setup.

We hope you guys managed to rest over the summer because we sure didn’t. Our engineering team has been working hard on developing new features and enhancements, some of which may have flown under your radar. To help you catch up, here’s a short recap of the latest and greatest from Logz.io with relevant referrals to read up more about the different items.

Pop quiz! What do email threads, restricted documents, and water-cooler conversations have in common? They are the raw materials with which information silos are built. We think of silos as rock-solid structures that can (and sometimes do) survive a category five tornado. But in truth, the information silos we encounter at work aren’t as indestructible as they seem. With a few techniques for more open, effective communication and a little bit of moxie, you and your team can beat the system.

With the recent release of Grafana 6.3 substantial refactoring and improvements to plugins, external auth systems, and permissions have been introduced in Grafana Enterprise. Let’s take a look at some of the latest Enterprise features here.

Our new app makes it incredibly easy for Zendesk users to escalate customer-reported issues to the proper team, right from the Zendesk UI. Customer service agents can also check on the status of existing alerts without leaving their dashboard. The launch of this app is more critical than ever, as constantly changing customer expectations demand that IT and service companies are high performing and always on.

A status page is a very easy-to-setup, nice and automated way to share the status of the websites/servers with visitors, users and teammates. And, the ability to share additional info with users like current issues or an upcoming maintenance can only make it better.

AquaSec’s Daniel Sagi recently authored a blog post about DNS spoofing in Kubernetes. TLDR is that if you use default networking in Kubernetes you might be vulnerable to ARP spoofing which can allow pods to spoof (impersonate) the IP addresses of other pods. Since so much traffic is dialed via domain names rather than IPs, spoofing DNS can allow you to redirect lots of traffic inside the cluster for nefarious purposes.

Cloud costs can come with significant sticker shock, especially since many businesses do not have an easy way to track or predict actual cost before the bill arrives. However, there are several architectural changes that businesses can make that will help rein in cloud spend. In some cases, optimal engineering decisions should be made up-front, while in other cases certain areas should be monitored over time to identify opportunities to retool architecture and optimize cloud costs.

Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Obsersvability Maturity Model. Well, the o11y maturity model was once again the primary topic and focus of Honeycomb’s most recent Observability Roundtable event held in San Francisco in mid August.