The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there are varying expectations and implementations when it comes to observability data. For another, most customers have to lean on a hodgepodge of tools that might blend open source and proprietary, require extensive onboarding as team members have to learn which tools are used for what, and have a steep learning curve in general.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. Virtual machines running on Google Compute Engine (GCE) provide some system logs and metrics without any configuration required, but capturing application and advanced system data has required the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

As part of my job as a Senior Solutions Engineer here at Grafana Labs, I tend to pretty easily find ways out of technical troubles. However, I was recently having some Wi-Fi issues at home and needed to do some troubleshooting. My experience changed my whole opinion on logs, and I wanted to share my story in hopes that I could open up some other people’s eyes as well. (I originally posted a version of this story on my personal blog in January.) First, some background info.

We’re excited to announce that, as a new entrant in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, Elastic has been recognized as a Challenger. You can download the complimentary report today. Read on to learn more about creating powerful, modern search experiences with Elastic Enterprise Search.

Today we’re going to talk about logging with Kubernetes on AWS using CloudWatch and SolarWinds® Papertrail™. We’ll cover setting up Papertrail, installing and configuring the rKubeLog package, viewing the logs in the Papertrail event viewer, and cross-checking those logs with the ones we see with kubectl. From there, we’ll set up a few different alerts.

Log Monitoring is a crucial step in ensuring to know what’s happening in all your servers from a single location. Did you know Log Monitoring tools are implemented by the strategy called “defense-in-depth”? Boom!!! That’s where the log monitoring concept developed, and now we have many log monitoring tools in the market. Issues that users face in the log monitoring tool: We considered all the above points while we designed our tool.

Did you know that you could configure PA Server Monitor’s Event Log Monitor feature to monitor one or more of your event logs? The event logs can include standard application, security, and system logs, as well as any custom event logs you want to monitor. With our server monitoring software, you have complete control and flexibility over the types of events you want to monitor.

Microservices and serverless are both important topics in the world of cloud-native computing. Yet, although serverless functions and microservices architectures often go hand-in-hand, they’re distinct technologies that fill different roles in modern software environments. Here’s an overview of what microservices and serverless are, how they relate to each other, how they are different, and why you may or may not wish to deploy a serverless microservice.

Lateral Movement describes techniques that adversaries use to pivot through multiple systems and accounts to improve access to an environment and subsequently get closer to their objective. Adversaries might install their own remote access tools to accomplish Lateral Movement, or use stolen credentials with native network and operating system tools that may be stealthier in blending in with normal systems administration activity.

More than once, I’ve heard experienced software developers say that there are only two reasons to log: either you log Information or you log an Error. The implication here is that either you want to record something that happened or you want to be able to react to something that went wrong. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at logging and explore the fact that log levels are more than just black or red rows in your main logging system.