Before the need for log correlation, there was a time not so long ago when reading software application logs was simple. Your application would output log files in sequential order, and you’d read through them. In the event of a bug, software outage, or security incident, you could easily parse what happened and when. It was a tedious process, but it was simple.

Following the fully featured public beta of the Elasticsearch Service on Microsoft Azure earlier this year, we are pleased to declare it is now generally available! Existing Elasticsearch Service customers can log in and launch deployments on Azure in their existing accounts, and new users can get started with a free 14-day trial of the Elasticsearch Service.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto solution for container orchestration. While it has, in some ways, simplified the management and deployment of your distributed applications and services, it has also introduced new levels of complexity. When maintaining a Kubernetes cluster, one must be mindful of all the different abstractions in its ecosystem and how the various pieces and layers interact with each other in order to avoid failed deployments, resource exhaustion, and application crashes.

Behavior analytics is a powerful tool in intrusion detection and prevention, using insights from typical user behavior to detect suspicious activity. What role does log monitoring have in this process and how does it work together with behavioral analytics?

“Service mesh” is an umbrella term for products that seek to solve the problems that microservices’ architectures create. These challenges include security, network traffic control, and application telemetry. The resolution of these challenges can be achieved by decoupling your application at layer five of the network stack, which is one definition of what service meshes do.

With the addition of new data structures in Lucene 6.0, the Elasticsearch 5.0 release delivered massive indexing and search performance improvements for one-dimension numeric, date, and IP fields, and two-dimension (lat, lon) geo_point fields. Building on this work, the Elasticsearch 6.0 release further improved usability and simplicity of the geo_point API by setting the default indexing structure to the new block k-d tree (BKD) and removing all support for legacy prefix tree encoding.

When working with Java or any other JVM-based programming language we get certain functionalities for free. One of those functionalities is clearing the memory. If you’ve ever used languages like C/C++ you probably remember functions like malloc, calloc, realloc and free. We needed to take care of the assignment of each byte in memory and take care of releasing the assigned memory when it was no longer needed.

Software giant Adobe is known the world around for its Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat products, which are rolled into cloud service suites — Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud — of other similar software offerings. A number of their products — especially those where image search is critical, such as Adobe Stock — feature slick search capabilities that use Elasticsearch behind the scenes.

We are happy to announce that Elastic Stack 7.5 brings support for the Azure Monitor service in Metricbeat and Azure activity logs and AD (Active Directory) activity reports in Filebeat.