Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the ability to publish VPC Flow Logs directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. For Splunk customers, this feature helps to optimize the architecture to send VPC Flow Logs directly to Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud Platform. With a fully managed service like Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, users don’t have to worry about scaling, and can optionally transform their data in near real-time and enjoy the cost-effective, reliable service.

A logging framework is a software tool that helps developers output diagnostic information during the execution of a program. This information is used to debug the program or monitor its performance. There are many different logging frameworks available, starting with simple logging libraries to full-fledged logging and observability platforms.

Without Network Monitoring, there is no good way to get a real-time view of your connected environment. But with Network Monitoring reports, you can look backwards to spot problems and trends. Just as vital are logs that deepen this rear-view mirror look, as they contain all the data for all the elements you are monitoring.

To keep Splunk running like a well-oiled machine, admins need to ensure that good data onboarding hygiene is practiced. Traditionally, this meant ensuring that your props.conf was configured with the “Magic 8” and that the REGEX in your transforms.conf was both precise and efficient.

An essential aspect of operating any application is the ability to observe the health and performance of that application and of the underlying infrastructure to quickly resolve issues as they arise. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) already provides audit logs, operational logs, and metrics along with out-of-the-box dashboards and automatic error reporting to facilitate running reliable applications at scale.

Akka’s license change has surprised many of us, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Lightbend recently announced that Akka will be transitioning from an “Open Source” license to a “Source available” license called BSL 1.1. Let’s unpack this to understand what it all means.

One of the biggest buzzwords (or really, buzz acronyms) to pop up in the cybersecurity space in recent years is XDR, or, extended detection and response. The term was coined in 2018 by Nir Zuk, CTO and co-founder of Palo Alto Networks. It was posited as a new way to think about security, where data is taken from several platforms and it gets correlated and analyzed.

A recent ESG/ISSA survey highlighted that security professionals are overwhelmed with competing proprietary data standards and integration challenges. Today’s security landscape often comprises dozens of tools, each with its own unique format. Even if the format is defined and widely adopted, like Syslog, implementations vary widely from tool to tool, or even from release to release for the same tool. How big of a problem are these differing data formats?