Over the past few years, and coupled with the growing adoption of microservices, distributed tracing has emerged as one of the most commonly used monitoring and troubleshooting methodologies. New tracing tools and frameworks are increasingly being introduced, driving adoption even further. One of these tools is Jaeger, a popular open source tracing tool. This article explores the integration of Jaeger with the ELK Stack for analysis and visualization of traces.

Apache Tomcat is the most popular application server for serving Java applications. Widely-used, mature and well documented, Tomcat can probably be defined as the de-facto industry standard. Some sources put Tomcat’s market share at over 60%! Tomcat is particularly popular for serving smaller applications since it doesn’t require the full Java EE platform. It consumes a relatively small amount of resources and provides users with simpler admin features.

Every developer’s worst nightmare is having to dig through a huge log file trying to pinpoint problems. The troubleshooting most likely won’t stop there. They’ll either have to follow the trail to multiple other log files and possibly on other servers. The log files may even be in different formats. This may go on until one loses themselves completely. Log aggregation is what you need to stop this seemingly never-ending cycle.

Kubernetes is a powerful platform that has shifted the way modern software operates and scales over the past five years. It’s got a strong open source community and benefits from innovation from the collective. Also, some of its current shortcomings are: difficulties in installation, complexity, and customization. In many ways, Kubernetes is like the Linux kernel: it provides a framework for running software, but none of the tools. This is where Kubernetes distributions (or distros) come in.

Another massive data breach was uncovered last week (30.6.19). The US-Israeli based company Cybereason traced via a year-long operation (called “Operation Soft Cell”), an attack that had been underway since 2012. This time it was the telecommunication sector that was hit. The most worrisome fact about this breach is not only the methods that were used (which were highly sophisticated) but the purpose of the hacking.

What if I told you that it took me just under 10 minutes, 8 commands and 6 mouse clicks to create this bar chart informing me — big surprise — that I have too many open tabs in Chrome on my Mac? That might sound like a lot to some readers, but if you’re not a stranger to ELK you’ll know that installing the stack, even for testing and development purposes, usually involves a whole lot more than that. ELK can be installed on almost any system and in any environment.

It’s time to stop thinking of Grafana as a general dashboarding tool. “Grafana Labs is on a journey to becoming a developer’s observability platform to support your classic DevOps use cases,” said Grafana Labs’ Director of UX, David Kaltschmidt, at a recent talk given at the 2019 InfluxDays Conference in London.

he Graylog community is what makes the product so exciting. It is awesome to see our community members take the time to help everyone over on our community forums, twitter, reddit or on their own private channels. I wanted to take some time to highlight a blog post by Community member BlueTeamNinja (aka Big Abe) who, after tackling a Graylog deployment shared lessons learned from a non-Linux/non-Elk person.

Logging your Kubernetes clusters to LogDNA is already a breeze, and now the LogDNA Kubernetes agent Helm chart makes it even easier. Helm is the official package manager for Kubernetes. With Helm, deploying and managing Kubernetes applications is as simple as typing a single command. This makes deploying the LogDNA agent across your cluster absolutely effortless.

Cloud is driving the way modern software is being built and deployed. At the forefront of this revolution is AWS, holding a whopping 33% of the cloud services market in Q1 2019. Considering AWS had a seven-year head start before its main competitors, Microsoft and Google, this dominance is not surprising. AWS offers, by far, the widest array of fully evolved cloud services, helping engineers to develop, deploy and run applications at cloud scale.