With almost every blog you read about monitoring, troubleshooting, or more recently, the observability of modern application stacks, you’ve probably read a statement saying that complexity is growing as a demand for more elasticity increases which makes management of these applications increasingly difficult. This blog will be no exception, but there’s a good reason for that: we just enabled the first Sumo Logic customers with powerful new tools to tackle these exact challenges.

One of the more delicate debates in the DevOps world is what observability has to do with monitoring. Is observability just a trendy buzzword that means the same thing as monitoring? Is observability an improved version of monitoring? Are monitoring and observability different types of processes that solve different problems? The answer to those questions depends in part on your perspective.

I drive a 2005 Ford diesel pickup truck. Most of the time my truck runs great. But occasionally an orange light on the dashboard will flicker on to alert me that something is wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no information about what is wrong and why. My truck has a monitoring solution, but not an observability solution. In many cases, IT has the same problem as my truck.

Splunk is a fantastic platform for ingesting, storing, searching and analysing data from logs, metrics and traces from a massive variety of sources. But does that mean we should ignore all of that data that doesn’t fall into these categories, like image and video data for example? Of course not!

Today, I’m happy to share more about our partnership and commitment to our users that they will have the best possible experience of both Elasticsearch and Grafana, across the full breadth of Elasticsearch functionality, with dedicated engineering from both Grafana Labs and Elastic. Through joint development of the official Grafana Elasticsearch plugin users can combine the benefits of Grafana’s visualization platform with the full capabilities of Elasticsearch.

The SQL Sentry Environment Health Overview (EHO), which is part of the dashboard shown on the Start page, enables you to see all the conditions that have fired alongside the overall health of your database environment. We understand how useful it is to be able to quickly review the health information without having to dig deep into performance data, and we’re excited to announce a few enhancements to the EHO, Events Log, and Actions Log available in the SQL Sentry 2021.1 release.

It’s important to ensure the logging and monitoring of a service is as consistent across environments as the code itself. However, it can be expensive and cumbersome to test the logging functionality with the usual required log exporters, database infrastructure, and processing requirements of normal production-grade solutions.

If you’re running a fleet of containerized applications on Kubernetes, aggregating and analyzing your logs can be a bit daunting if you’re not equipped with the proper knowledge and tools. Thankfully, there’s plenty of useful documentation to help you get started; observIQ provides the tools you need to gather and analyze your application logs with ease.

Any organization with data assets is a possible target for an attacker. Hackers use various forms of advanced cyberattack techniques to obtain valuable company data; in fact, a study by the University of Maryland showed that a cyberattack takes place every 39 seconds, or 2,244 times a day on average. This number has increased exponentially since the COVID-19 pandemic forced most employees to work remotely, and drastically increased the attack surface of organizations around the world.

LogDNA recently celebrated 5 years since our launch in Y Combinator and during this half-a-decade we’ve learned several lessons about balancing cost and scalability. As a founder, here are the top 3 things I wish someone had told me as we were racing towards success. The appeal of building a cloud-native application for a startup is a no brainer—it’s agile, scalable, and can be managed by a distributed team. Not to mention, it’s the cheapest way to get off the ground.