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How Data Analytics Support the CDM Program

Continuing Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) is a program of the Department of Homeland Security designed to enhance cybersecurity across the Federal government. By deploying a standardized stack of pre-approved security tools, CDM ensures that small and large agencies alike can protect their networks from common threats.

Tracking Systems Metrics with collectd

System administrators hold many key responsibilities within an IT organization. Most importantly, they must ensure that all systems, services, and applications are up, running, and performing as expected. When a system starts to lag or an application is down, the system administrators are called upon to troubleshoot and resolve the issue as quickly as possible to limit the impact on customers.

Understanding the Apache Access Log: View, Locate and Analyze

As any developer or system administrator will tell you, log files are an extremely useful tool for debugging issues within a web application. In fact, log files are typically utilized as the primary source of information when a website is malfunctioning. One specific log file that can be used in debugging applications (or simply gaining insight into visitor activity) is the access log produced by an Apache HTTP server.

AWS offers 175 services now. Should you be adopting many of them now?

At this year’s AWS reInvent, we heard Andy Jassy go on stage to announce a bunch of new services to help companies unleash the power of cloud. 27 new services to be exact - everything from Machine learning IDE, to code review tools to contact center offerings (see the full list here); last year, AWS announced another 30 new services ranging from machine learning to VR/AR to satellite data. So now AWS has over 175 services - a staggering count by any imagination.

Can You Tell Debug Data and BI Data Apart?

A few blogs posts ago I wrote about new BI for digital companies and in that blog I alluded that quite a bit of that BI is based on log data. I wanted to follow up on the topic of logs, why they exist and why they contain so much data that is relevant to BI. As I said in that post, logs are an artifact of software development and they are not premeditated, they are generated by developers almost exclusively for the purpose of debugging pre-production code. So how is it that logs are so valuable for BI?

What is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)?

In this three-part series, we will take a hard look at Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service: how it helps organizations run Kubernetes on AWS, what insights can be gained in EKS and how it’s monitored, and finally, how organizations can get the most out of EKS with the help of Sumo Logic. For the first installment, we’ll learn how it works and how organizations can get started with Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service.

Top 5 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020

With 2020 around the corner, we’re entering a new decade in the cybersecurity landscape. What does the future hold for security professionals? We’d like to ring in the new year with good news, but the truth is that hackers will become smarter and breaches will grow in scale and number, creating an even greater pressure for security teams to keep up. Read our five predictions for 2020 to understand what to look out for and how to prepare for the new decade.

How to View Logs in Kubectl

Kubernetes has become the de-facto solution for container orchestration. While it has, in some ways, simplified the management and deployment of your distributed applications and services, it has also introduced new levels of complexity. When maintaining a Kubernetes cluster, one must be mindful of all the different abstractions in its ecosystem and how the various pieces and layers interact with each other in order to avoid failed deployments, resource exhaustion, and application crashes.

All The Logs For All The Intelligence

If you are reading this, I don’t have to convince you any further of the powerful intelligence we can derive from logs and machine data. If you are anything like the many, many users, customers and prospects we have been talking to over the years, you might, however, have some level of that pesky modern condition commonly known as volume anxiety. The volume here, of course, is the volume of data––there is a lot of it, and it keeps growing.

NGINX vs Apache - Which Web Server Is Right for You?

Today's IT and DevOps teams have not one, but two, feature-rich open source Web servers to choose from: NGINX and Apache HTTP Server (which is often called simply "Apache"). At a high level, both platforms do the same core thing: Host and serve Web content. Both also offer comparable levels of performance and security. Yet when you dive into the details, you'll find that there are many differences between NGINX and Apache.