The business of observability is all about data: what you’re observing in the data, how you’re visualizing it, what it indicates about the state of your environment, and how to address issues that may occur. Creating your own perspective for observability, and understanding what you’re seeing, can be difficult.

The more customers I talk to, the more I see a trend toward wanting a low-cost vendor-agnostic data lake. Customers want the freedom to store their data long-term and typically look to object stores from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. To optimize for data access, users will partition their data into directories to optimize for use cases such as Cribl Replay and Cribl Search. Only relevant files will be accessed for rehydration or search by partitioning data.

In most situations, you will have several sources of telemetry data that you want to send to multiple destinations, such as storage locations and observability tools. In turn, the data that you are sending needs to be optimized for its specific destination. If your data contains Personally Identifying Information (PII) for example, this data will need to be redacted or encrypted before reaching its destination.

Load Balancing is the process of distributing network traffic among multiple server resources. The objective of load balancing is to optimize certain network operations. Ensuring that a workload is spread evenly among the computing resources, this “balanced load” improves application responsiveness and accommodates unexpected traffic spikes — all without compromising application performance. Let’s take a deeper look at this important networking function.

Federal agencies are adopting a more modern, digital-centered approach in everything they do. That’s good progress, but it’s also exposing some critical problems in the modernization journey.

FortiGate firewall logs are crucial for network security and compliance. These logs contain valuable information about network traffic, including source and destination IP addresses, ports, protocols, timestamps, and firewall actions. With FortiGate log volumes growing annually, many organizations face challenges in processing and storing these logs efficiently. In part 1 of this series, we covered an overview of Fortigate logs, and some of the challenges they pose for Security and DevOps teams.

With observIQ’s contributions to OpenTelemetry, you can now use free, open-source tools to easily aggregate data across your entire infrastructure to any or multiple analysis tools. The easiest way to use the latest OpenTelemetry tools is with observIQ’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. You can find it here. In this blog, we cover how to use OpenTelemetry to monitor SNMP.

The Cribl Syslog source is our most commonly used input type. Cribl Stream can act as your edge and/or central syslog server, giving you more capability while easing management tasks. In this blog post we’ll go over a brief history of syslog. Then we’ll dive into best practices for standing up Cribl Stream as a syslog server, tuning the server, and other tips for running a high performance syslog platform.

With the development and increased usage of cloud-native technologies, containers, and microservices-based architectures, log monitoring has become a fundamental component of effective management for organizations. Logs offer users insights into occurring issues and assist them in understanding how their software performs over time, where it excels, and where it fails.