Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Software often seems like a benign version of Game of Thrones, in which any dominant or ascending technology/methodology is constantly challenged by newer and more attractive rivals. So as soon as microservices entered the mainstream, it didn’t take long until some developers saw it as flawed, and proposed nanoservices as a replacement. In this article, we ask why the move to breaking down software into smaller and smaller pieces is a good idea.

When your users are encountering errors or high latency in your application, drilling down to view the logs from a problematic request can reveal exactly what went wrong. By pulling together all the logs pertaining to a given request, you can see in rich detail how it was handled from beginning to end so you can quickly diagnose the issue.

The ELK Stack is a great open-source stack for log aggregation and analytics. It stands for Elasticsearch (a NoSQL database and search server), Logstash (a log shipping and parsing service), and Kibana (a web interface that connects users with the Elasticsearch database and enables visualization and search options for system operation users). With a large open-source community, ELK has become quite popular, and it is a pleasure to work with.

When managing cloud-native applications, it’s essential to have end-to-end visibility into what’s happening at any given time. This is especially true because of the distributed and dynamic nature of cloud-native apps, which are often deployed using ephemeral technologies like containers and serverless functions.

With the final season of Game of Thrones premiering just last night, the question on the mind of every super fan is who will finally rise to the iron throne? To find the answer, we used Twitter along with our machine data analytics platform to check the popularity of specific characters and how often they are mentioned alongside the term “iron throne”.

In recent years, monoliths have lost favor as microservices increased in popularity. Conventional wisdom says that microservices, and distributed systems in general, are hard to operate: There are often too many dependencies and tunables, multiple moving parts, and operational complexity.

In a hyper-connected world, the threat landscape is undoubtedly evolving. Ensuring the security of your enterprise networks on a daily basis is essential to protect your business, no matter how big (or small) it is. According to SophosLabs’ 2019 threat report, one dangerous ransomware called SamSam cost companies $6.5 million ($10K to $50K per ransom).

Democratizing data is one of our key product goals, and we share a similar approach to content. With over half a million words, our Sumo Logic documentation set is a substantial amount of information to provide to our users on the various ways you can collect logs and metrics, query that information, and turn it into meaningful visualizations. But the real trick is making sure that people can find what they need quickly.

Logging your virtual machines (VMs) is important, but what’s even more important is logging the hypervisors that run them. Hypervisors generate extremely useful data about the operation of your virtual machines and the environments that they run in. While VMs provide some information about their state, details such as VM performance, changes in state, errors, and security can only be found through hypervisor logs.