Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana — the trio better known as Elastic Stack (or ELK, if you prefer a term that is now going out of style), make up a powerful set of tools for searching and analyzing data. Their power derives not just from their technical features, but also the fact that Elastic Stack is an open source platform that anyone can download and set up anywhere.

What an amazing first week! I’ve been marketing open source technologies for over 15 years. During that time, I’ve been involved in many new product releases. Nothing comes close to the response we’ve had from k3s – http://k3s.io. Judging by the incredible feedback (including over 4,500 GitHub stars in one week), the release of k3s appears to have landed at exactly the right time.

You might be surprised to learn that I’m not the most organized person by nature. My wife still recounts, with horror, the story of when she first saw where I lived and discovered my office. Her breath caught in her throat when her eyes fell on my “filing system,” which basically consisted of individually stacked piles of paper — cellphone bills here, bank statements there, and so forth.

Elastic Stack Features (formerly X-Pack) is an Elastic Stack extension that bundles security, alerting, monitoring, reporting, and graph capabilities. One could use either all or specific components.

Just to recap, so far our ongoing series about the Istio service mesh we’ve talked about the benefits of using a service mesh, using Istio for application deployments and traffic management, and how Istio helps you achieve your security goals. In today’s installment, we’re going to dig further into monitoring, tracing, and service-level objectives.

Did you ever have your customer success team (if you have the chance to have one!) overwhelmed by customers throught the support chat when facing minor incidents or even major outages, having to update all those worried customers in real time throught dozens of different channels as the engineering team finds out and resolves the issue? Support costs time, energy and money. What if all of your users could all connect to one single status page that would answer all of their questions?

Datadog is pleased to announce the availability of Synthetics, a whole new layer of visibility on the Datadog platform. By monitoring your applications and API endpoints via simulated user requests, Synthetics helps you ensure uptime, identify regional issues, track application performance, and manage your SLAs and SLOs. By unifying Synthetics with your metrics, traces, and logs, Datadog allows you to observe how all your systems are performing as experienced by your users.