Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

Best Splunk Alternatives [2023]

Every business from large enterprises through to small startups needs some level of log management in their day to day operations. For large-scale enterprises, Splunk has quickly become one of the most popular log management solutions globally. Splunk was developed for enterprise-level log analysis and Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM). The tool can also be used by medium-size enterprises as long as your organisation generates large volumes of machine data and log files.

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry-Tracer and TracerProvider

OpenTelemetry is a strong standard for instrumentation because it is built of careful, well-thought-out abstractions created by experts in the space. OpenTelemetry feels painful to start using because it’s full of abstractions that make sense to experts in the space. For a developer who wants to think about their own software and not spend a month becoming an expert in telemetry, this is hard. For high-level conceptual description, there’s the OpenTelemetry specification.

Icinga Web - Not just Black and White

Most of you know that Icinga Web can be adjusted by themes. Some of you also have made some! Icinga Web itself comes with several themes since the early days. Now with the next upcoming major update v2.10 we’ll take themes to their next evolution. But since we’ve postponed this feature, much additional work has gone into it, which I want to outline today. There will be some general hints for module/theme development as well.

Azure AD Monitoring Tips and Strategies

The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service and an identity provider (IdP). Azure AD is the backbone for authentication in Microsoft 365 and for thousands of cloud-based SaaS applications. Azure AD provides several features for your organization and one of the features is the Microsoft Identity Platform.

Webinar Recap: Force Multiply Your Security Operations Teams with Cribl LogStream

We hosted a webinar a few weeks back on using Cribl LogStream to make your security operations more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective. The turnout was fantastic and, while we answered most of the audience’s questions live, we couldn’t get to all of them. So I’ll go through the questions we couldn’t get to and offer some answers. Along the way, I’ll also share the results of two polling questions we asked during the webinar.

Launching a labor of love, Kentik Market Intelligence

When it comes to the internet, understanding the global ecosystem can be tough. There’s a lot of manual work that service providers and digital businesses have traditionally put into finding the best way to reach customers over IP networks. And more work is needed for benchmarking against competitors and finding the best relationships for peering.

Logstash: Path to ECS for 8.0

The Elastic Common Schema is a community-driven effort to provide consistent semantic meaning to datasets so that data from disparate sources can be meaningfully used together. In Logstash 8.0, ECS compatibility is on-by-default — this is a pretty major change to how many plugins operate. In this talk, we outline the rationale behind the transition and also highlight how to opt-OUT of the transition with a simple pipeline setting.

Bootstrapping a cloud native multi-data center observability stack

Bram Vogelaar is a DevOps Cloud Engineer at The Factory, and he recently delivered an intro to observability talk during our Grafana Labs' EMEA meetup. When I talk to customers, they might tell me about how their applications are running in two data centers, but when we probe a little further, it turns out that their observability stack is only available in one of them. This revelation hit close to home last March.