If you watched our recent SolarWinds Day: Secure by Design panel discussion, you know security is a critical need for all businesses today. Secure by Design is our guiding principle for how we built our security approach, adhering to government regulations and industry expectations.

Node.js logging, like any form of software instrumentation, isn’t an easy thing to get right. It takes time, effort, and a willingness to continue to iterate until a proper balance is struck. There are so many points to consider, including: Previously, here on the Loggly blog, I began exploring these questions in the context of three of the most popular web development languages: PHP, Python, and Ruby. But these aren’t the only popular languages in use today.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become a critical part of almost every business. APIs are responsible for transferring information between systems within a company or to external companies. For example, when you log in to a website like Google or Facebook, an API processes your login credentials to verify they are correct.

Our hybrid world is rapidly growing and changing due to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotics, quantum computing, and cloud services. While these advancements bring many advantages, they’ve also made digital systems more complex, increased cost, and introduced new cybersecurity challenges.

Unplanned downtime is an eventuality every business tries to avoid but will face. In today’s digitally interconnected world, outages can be particularly damaging, especially if the business is unprepared. Not only can outages cause employee frustration and anger customers, leading to numerous intangible costs like lower satisfaction hurting a company’s reputation, but the loss of employee productivity caused by unplanned downtime can significantly affect the bottom line.

In recent years, teams have drastically changed how they communicate and collaborate. With the rise of physical distancing and remote work, many businesses have found email slow and burdensome. Instead, they use chat clients like Microsoft Teams or Slack to effortlessly share information and solve problems without needing more online calls.

Organizations implementing observability in their digital services architecture should be familiar with OpenTelemetry (OTEL) framework. While our OTEL guide provides an in-depth examination of the benefits of this open-source framework, the potential security challenges with OpenTelemetry warrant a separate guide.

Papertrail has had the ability to alert on searches that match events for years, but what about when they don’t? When a cron job, backup, or other recurring job doesn’t run, it’s not easy to notice the absence of an expected message. But now, Papertrail can do the noticing for you with inactivity alerts. Papertrail inactivity alerts allow you to setup notifications when searches don’t match events.

An observability strategy helps many businesses support the stability and performance of complex, distributed IT environments. Since you may already be tracking the three pillars of observability—metrics, logs, and traces—why shouldn’t you also use the endless stream of telemetry data to identify security risks and vulnerabilities, just as you use it to monitor and stabilize operations? Even the best-planned observability strategy is incomplete without the fourth pillar of security.