Posts tagged IT Ops

3 min IT Ops

4 Reasons to Love Your Log Data

Data logging by essential IT equipment has been around since the beginning of the modern computer era. Operating systems, application software, hardware, and a plethora of IT equipment in and on the network generate log files, and IT professionals can often find themselves knee deep in an overwhelming amount of data, especially as cloud services are added to the mix [/2014/04/apm-is-not-enough/]. But, the truth is that if used properly, log data can be a very good friend to both IT and business

4 min IT Ops

What is "real-time" anyway…?

I love a good buzzword…cloud, big data, analytics …And even more than the buzzwords, I love the liberties people tend to take applying these buzzwords to their new systems and services. Such buzzwords regularly get abused and often get washed into marketing material and product websites in an attempt to hoodwink and woo new unsuspecting customers. One of my (least) favorite buzzwords, that I’ve noticed popping up more recently in particular in the logging space is “real-time.” So what does re

1 min IT Ops

A Note on Logentries Security

The recent OpenSSL vulnerability CVE-2014-0160 [http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140407.txt], nicknamed “Heartbleed,” affected large part of the Internet. It was caused by a relatively trivial bug, a missing check for an input value, which can lead to a buffer overrun, causing leaking of an unrelated block of memory. This can ultimately lead to compromising of the secret keys used to encrypt the traffic, which essentially allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly f

3 min IT Ops

Automating logging to Logentries

Staying on the subject of devops, specifically server automation and monitoring, I’m going to show you how you can automatically send logs to Logentries using Chef [http://www.getchef.com/chef/] and Vagrant [http://www.vagrantup.com/]. If you are unfamiliar with either of these technologies I suggest you have a look through my previous posts [/author/joe/] to bring you up to speed on things. [/content/images/le-img/2014/04/logentries-chef.png] We’re going to cover how to install the logentrie

2 min IT Ops

5 Great Blogs for DevOps

If you are a DevOps professional looking to get more involved or further your learning, or just looking for some entertaining, insightful content, we wanted to put together a list of 5 great blogs for DevOps. And, we know we missed some, so feel free comment and share what other blogs should be on here! A few great blogs that we think you might find valuable: 1. ContinuousDelivery.com [http://continuousdelivery.com/] – Dave Farley and Jez Humble run this site. Jez is a principal consult

6 min IT Ops

Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra Cluster Pt. 2 - Solutions

This is the second part of a two part series. Before you read this, you should go back and read the original article, “Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra Cluster Pt. 1 – The Problem [/2014/03/synchronizing-clocks-in-a-cassandra-cluster-pt-1-the-problem/].” In it, I covered how important clocks are and how bad clocks can be in virtualized systems (like Amazon EC2) today. In today’s installment, I’m going to cover some disadvantages of off-the-shelf NTP installations, and how to overcome them. C

5 min IT Ops

Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra Cluster Pt. 1 - The Problem

Cassandra [https://cassandra.apache.org/] is a highly-distributable NoSQL database with tunable consistency. What makes it highly distributable makes it also, in part, vulnerable: the whole deployment must run on synchronized clocks. It’s quite surprising that, given how crucial this is, it is not covered sufficiently in literature. And, if it is, it simply refers to installation of a NTP daemon on each node which – if followed blindly – leads to really bad consequences. You will find blog post

3 min IT Ops

DevOps: Vagrant with Chef-Server

In my last blog post, The DevOps Tools We Use & How We Use Them [/2014/02/the-devops-tools-we-use-how-we-use-them/], I talked about how we use Chef [http://www.getchef.com/chef/] with Vagrant [http://www.vagrantup.com/] for managing, maintaining and monitoring our servers. (If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you have a quick look at it for reference.) This is great for a development environment where you spin up servers locally in Virtualbox, however in doesn’t help much when trying to maint

2 min IT Ops

How To Run Rsyslog in a Docker Container for Logging

I’ve been playing around with Docker [https://www.docker.io/] this morning (read as I have followed their 15 min tutorial and have installed it on an Ubuntu instance – so I’m not quite the expert yet). I was initially interested in figuring out what log management [https://logentries.com/doc/log-management/] looks like for any Docker users out there. From first look, Docker has a “logs” command that will fetch the logs from a container. You can run this via the docker daemon and it will  captu

2 min IT Ops

Real User Monitoring: I Need Insight And I Need It Now

In the past it was assumed that the web-based interface was the most important, and often the only, path for a user to access content or a product. But those days are gone and now companies must embrace supporting multiple interfaces on different platforms in order to satisfy their users. With customers looking to use a mix of clients, with the most common being Web, iOS, Android and Windows Phones, companies need to invest in optimizing for these channels and, hence, protecting their investment

6 min IT Ops

Mobile Apps: 6 Steps to A Wealth of Untapped Data

With mobile technology becoming a bigger part of many companies’ front end coverage, it makes sense to ensure that you are getting a good return on your investment by delivering a high quality app that works for your users. With this in mind we are excited to announce the release of our iOS and Android libraries [https://logentries.com/insights/mobile/]. When used in conjunction with our JavaScript library, these will give you coverage over virtually your whole front end. Mobile adoption for U

3 min IT Ops

An Inflection Point for Mobile Devices & App Monitoring

You may not have noticed, but history has unfolded before our very eyes in the past few months, with mobile device sales expected to outpace those of the traditional laptops for the first time (at least according to IDC research last September [http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24314413]). To shed some light on the expected pace of change, by 2017 it’s anticipated that 87% of the worldwide smart connected device market will be tablets and smartphones, with PCs (both desktop and lapt

2 min IT Ops

How to Monitor the Health of Your Application and Infrastructure With the Same Solution

With an attractive total cost of ownership of cloud-based solutions versus on-premise solutions, a highly flexible nature and the ability to scale up rapidly, there has been a steady increase in companies moving infrastructure out of racks and into the cloud. As more companies move their mission critical systems out of their physical control to these cloud-based solutions, it only makes sense that their application and machine generated logs are even more important than ever before. With that

2 min IT Ops

Amazon S3 Archiving...You asked, we delivered!

One thing we like to think we do well here at Logentries is listen to our global user base [/2014/01/global-tags-alerts/]! Something that a lot of you have asked for recently is log archiving. Ask and you shall receive – we have now opened a Beta for archiving to Amazon S3. So you can be safe in the knowledge that your log files will be archived safely every night to a reliable storage facility should you ever need them in the future. You can also be sure that any compliance or PCI requirements

4 min IT Ops

How to Send Log Data via a Proxy Server using Rsyslog

If you have a large number of servers you may have a requirement to configure proxy servers in various parts of your network to accept messages and then forward them to a centralized logging solution or service [https://logentries.com]. We regularly see this with larger customers where it makes sense to collect logs centrally before sending them on to Logentries for analysis. In some cases this can be a more stringent requirement where parts of your network may not have direct access to the publ