Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IoT (Internet of Things) is the overarching term used to describe the extensive network of devices connected to the Internet. This term covers a broad range of objects or ‘things’ from consumer technology such as smart home lighting to crop management in agriculture. IoT allows everyday devices to effectively connect and exchange data with one another.

At observIQ, we are big believers and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In 2023, we noticed project awareness reached an all-time high as we attended trade shows like KubeCon and Monitorama. The project’s benefits of flexibility, performance, and vendor agnosticism have been making their rounds; we’ve seen a groundswell of customer interest.

Organizations today face a growing list of obstacles as they try to improve their detection, coverage, and accuracy. For one, data proliferation is happening at an astronomical rate. When was the last time your network bandwidth went down? What about your license costs for data storage or your SIEM? Difficulties arise from overlapping and poorly integrated tools that generate disparate data streams and several operational efficiencies.

Data is never just data. There are structured and unstructured data, qualitative and quantitative data. Among these varied types, continuous data stands out as a key player, especially in the quantitative realm. Continuous data, with its infinite possibilities and precision, captures the fluidity of the real world — from the microseconds of a website’s load time to the fluctuating bandwidth usage on a network.

When people bemoan the complexity of interconnected IT environments, they usually mean that an organization has a lot of applications that all share data with each other. As your organization adds more applications, you need to make sure that they securely share data with each other. In short, security and development teams find themselves working to deploy and protect the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable applications to talk to each other.

Now, many teams are incorporating microservices architecture, with this trend only continuing. This allows them to employ their applications across distributed environments. Whilst this is advantageous as it makes it much simpler to build, scale, and deliver it can also become much more challenging to monitor and troubleshoot the components that make up the environment.

Log4j is a logging framework for Java, facilitating the systematic recording of runtime information in software applications. Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Log4j has become a standard tool in Java development since its inception in 1996. Its primary purpose is to generate log messages that provide insights into the application's execution, aiding developers in debugging, monitoring, and analysing software behaviour.