Microsoft Azure provides a suite of cloud computing services that allow organizations across every industry to deploy, manage, and monitor full-scale web applications. As you expand your Azure-based applications, securing the full scope of your cloud resources becomes an increasingly complex task. Azure platform logs record the who, what, when, and where of all user-performed and service account activity within your Azure environment.

We built LogDNA around the idea that developers are more productive when they have access to all of the logs they need, when they need them. However, we also know that log management can get expensive fast. And, for anyone who owns the budget for developer tools, logs can be an unpredictable line item as you try to determine your monthly, quarterly or even annual spend.

Cloud services make the daily tasks of business easier. They enable remote workforce collaboration, streamline administrative tasks, and reduce capital costs. However, these “pros” come with a few “cons.” The IT stack’s increased complexity means staff work across divergent log management tools when something breaks. Centralized log management for the cloud makes root cause analysis easier by aggregating all event log data in a single location.

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.