Last updated at Tue, 12 Mar 2024 13:40:06 GMT
Our mission at Rapid7 is to solve complex security and IT challenges with simple, innovative solutions. Late last year Logentries joined the Rapid7 family to help to drive this mission. The Logentries technology itself had been designed to reveal the power of log data to the world and had built a community of 50,000 users on the foundations of our real time, easy to use yet powerful log management and analytics engine.
Today we are excited to announce InsightOps, the next generation of Logentries. InsightOps builds on the fundamental premise that in a world where systems are increasingly distributed, cloud-based and made up of connected/smart devices, log and machine data is inherently valuable to understand what is going on, be that from a performance perspective, troubleshooting customer issues or when investigating security threats.
However, InsightOps also builds on a second fundamental premise, which is that log data is very often an incomplete view of your system, and while log and machine data is invaluable for troubleshooting, investigations and monitoring, it is generally at its most powerful when used in conjunction with other data sources.
If you think about it, knowing exactly what to log up front to give you 100% code or system coverage is like trying to predict the future. Thus when problems arise or investigations are underway, you may not have the complete picture you need to identify the true root cause.
To solve this problem InsightOps allows users to ask questions of specific endpoints in your environment. The endpoints return answers to these questions, in seconds, in the form of log events such that they can be correlated with your existing log data. I think of it as being able to generate 'synthetic logs' on the fly - logs designed to answer your questions as you investigate or need vital missing information. How often have you said during troubleshooting or an investigation "I wish I had logged that…”? Now you can ask questions in real time to fill in the missing details e.g. “who was the last person to have logged into this machine?”
InsightOps combines both log data and endpoint information such that users can get a more complete understanding of their infrastructure and applications through a single solution. InsightOps will now deliver this IT data in one place and thus avoids the need for IT professionals to jump between several, disparate tools in order to get a more complete picture of their systems. By the way - this is the top pain point IT professionals have reported across lots and lots of conversations that we have had, and that we continue to have, with our large community of users.
To say I am excited about this is an understatement - I've been building and researching log analytics solutions for more than 10 years and I truly believe the power provided by combining logs and endpoints will be a serious game changer for anybody who utilizes log data as part of their day to day responsibilities -- be that for asset management, infrastructure monitoring, maintaining compliance or simply achieving greater visibility, awareness and control over your IT environment.
InsightOps will also be providing some awesome new capabilities beyond our new endpoint technology, including:
Visual Search: Visual search is an exciting new way of searching and analyzing trends in your log data by interacting with auto-generated graphs. InsightOps will automatically identify key trends in your logs and will visualize these when in visual search mode. You can interact with these to filter your logs allowing you to search and look for trends in your log data without having to write a single search query.
New Dashboards and Reporting: We have enhanced our dashboard technology making it easier to configure dashboards as well as providing a new, slicker look and feel. Dashboards can also be exported to our report manager where you can store and schedule reports, which can be used to provide a view of important trends e.g. reporting to management or for compliance reporting purposes.
Data Enrichment: Providing additional context and structuring log data can be invaluable for easier analysis and ultimately to drive more value from your log and machine data. InsightOps enhances your logs by enriching them in 2 ways, (1) by combining endpoint data with your traditional logs to provide additional context and (2) by normalization your logs into a common JSON structure such that it is easier for users to work with, run queries against, build dashboards etc.
