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Logtrail + Kibana = Retro Terminal Experience

Logtrail is a popular Kibana plugin that makes Kibana look like Papertrail. Sematext’s Logtrail view in Kibana gives you the terminal-like experience of exploring logs without the pain of needing to ssh into machines. With Logtrail you can see new logs appearing at the bottom of the screen instead of the top screen, you can filter logs like with grep, and “jump” to different parts of the log stream like when using less.

Jaeger vs Zipkin - OpenTracing Distributed Tracers

In the previous three parts of our OpenTracing series, we provided an Overview of OpenTracing, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve, we looked at Zipkin – a popular open-source distributed tracer and then at Jaeger – a newer open-source distributed tracer developed under the CNCF umbrella. In this blog post – the last part of the OpenTracing series – we will compare Jaeger vs. Zipkin side by side!

Garbage Collection Settings for Elasticsearch Master Nodes

Elasticsearch comes with good out-of-the-box Garbage Collection settings. So good in fact that the Definitive Guide recommends not changing them. While we agree that most use-cases wouldn’t benefit from GC tuning, especially when it turns out there simply isn’t enough heap, there are exceptions. We found that G1 GC, for example, works well on big heaps. This allows you to have less, bigger nodes, which in turn means less network traffic in a large cluster.

OpenTracing: Jaeger as Distributed Tracer

In the previous two parts of OpenTracing series, we provided a good OpenTracing overview, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve and looked at Zipkin – a popular open-source distributed tracer. In this blog post, we will look at Jaeger, a newer open-source distributed tracer developed under the CNCF umbrella.

GDPR: Top 5 Logging Best Practices

The rather broad definition of personal data in the GDPR requires paying special attention to log data. GDPR and personal data in web server logs is a popular topic in many GDPR fora. For example, IP addresses or cookies might be considered personal data. Consequently, such data must be stored only with the consent of customers for a limited time. It is highly recommended to anonymize personal data before you hand over the logs to any 3rd party to minimize risk.

OpenTracing: Zipkin as Distributed Tracer

In part one of the OpenTracing blog series we provided a good OpenTracing overview, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve. One of the key aspects of OpenTracing is that it is vendor neutral, and also that OpenTracing is just a specification. In order to instrument an application via OpenTracing API, it’s necessary to have an OpenTracing-compatible tracer correctly deployed and listening for incoming span requests.