6 min
IT Ops
Do You Still Email Yourself from Your Code? How to Stop the Madness
A few years back now, I took on an assignment to help a company modernize a
series of legacy .NET applications. One of these did some back office
processing. A vendor would stick some files on a shared drive, and a windows
scheduled task would invoke this bit of code to parse the file, apply a whole
slew of business rules to its contents, and then update the appropriate internal
systems. The details are both proprietary and uninteresting, so I will spare
you those.
The author of this appli
3 min
IT Ops
Webinar Recap: Logentries Feature Walkthrough
Our March webinar was broadcasted & recorded on March 16th 2016. This broadcast
included a Logentries demonstration by Mike Neville-O’Neill, followed by a live
Q&A lead by Justin Buchanan and Matt Kiernan.
The webinar recording is available here
[http://info.logentries.com/logentries-feature-walkthrough-march].
Below is a summary of some of the features covered. To follow along, or to try
the features for yourself, be sure to create a free Logentries account
[https://logentries.com/get-start
13 min
IT Ops
The 4 Steps for Creating a Log Enabled Marketing Campaign
Typically, most logging activity in the online world is concerned with
collecting information about an enterprise’s digital infrastructure. Machine
logs, application logs, network logs, database logs, access logs are a few
examples of such activity. However, as marketing campaigns become more
integrated into application activity, using log data to monitor and to measure
the effectiveness of a campaign is a viable extension of an enterprise’s current
logging activity.
But, we need to beware.
5 min
IT Ops
Brics Vs RE2/J
By Benoit Gaudin and Mark Lacomber
Regular Expressions
When it comes to searching unstructured data, regular expressions
[https://logentries.com/doc/regex/] are a very useful and powerful tool. The
power provided by popular regular expression libraries does come with a
significant performance cost in some cases though, both when compiling regular
expressions into automata (state explosion problem when determinising automata,
as illustrated on some examples here
[http://www.microarch.org/micro4
5 min
IT Ops
A point of @Contention- cache coherence on the JVM
Java 8’s major changes- lexical closures, the stream API, e.t.c have
overshadowed a slew of little gems, one of which I only discovered the other
day- the @Contended annotation.
False Sharing
Chances are you’re reading this on a device with more than one CPU. There’s
therefore also quite a good chance the you have more than one thread of
execution running at the exact same time. There’s an equally good chance that
some of your fancy multiprocessor CPU’s on-die memory (aka L2/3 cache) is share
4 min
IT Ops
Deciphering MySQL Logs: The What, Why, and How
Logs are one of the best ways to understand what a server is doing. Thankfully,
MySQL has no shortage of log activity to assist a DBA in its maintenance. It
writes out its activity to 5 different logs. This post will take a look at the
existing MySQL logs and how they assist the administrator.
* On Windows, - The log is written to the data directory with a .err extension
even if not explicitly enabled.
* Errors are automatically written to the Event Log. This behavior is standard
and
3 min
IT Ops
How to Analyze Heroku's New Runtime Metrics
Heroku Labs [https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/labs], Heroku’s platform
for providing “experimental features that are under consideration for inclusion
into the Heroku platform”, recently launched <a
href="https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/log-runtime-metrics"
target="_blank">log-runtime-metrics</a> for “enabling visibility into load and
memory usage for running dynos”. With log-runtime metrics, Heroku now inserts
the following per-dyno stats directly into the log stream:
* Memory
8 min
IT Ops
7 Rules for Using Log Data Effectively in a Retrospective
Log data [https://logentries.com/insights/log-data-centralization/] can be an
indispensable tool for doing an effective Retrospective following a technical
disaster. Yet, often the data is misused. And many think that the entire
Retrospective process is flawed altogether. More often than not Retrospectives,
also known as Post Mortems, turn into technical autopsies. A bunch of people get
together to find out how the system died and who is responsible. Data becomes
nothing more than evidence of
3 min
IT Ops
New Automated Log Parsing
The Logentries product is always improving and advancing. There are some
exciting new features available today, and another great feature coming this
month!
Included in today’s announcement:
1. Automated Log Parsing
* Apache and Nginx logs
* Syslog Tags
2. Nested JSON Support
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Automated Log Parsing
If you’ve ever sent data to Logentries you may have noticed keys being
automatically highlighted and availa
10 min
IT Ops
Logging for Unikernels
Unikernels are the next step in virtualized computing. There is a lot of hubbub
right now in the tech-o-sphere about unikernels. In fact, in many circles
unikernels are thought to be the Next Big Thing. There is a lot of recent news
to justify this perspective. Docker, a key player in Linux Containers, has
acquired Unikernel Systems. MirageOS, the library that you use to create
unikernels has solid backing from Xen and the Linux Foundation as an incubator
project.
Unikernels are not going any
2 min
IT Ops
Logging from Sonos Speakers with a Webhook
Our Boston sales office has a big set of Sonos [https://www.sonos.com/] speakers
around their office that pumps tunes out across the office. It’s great for
camaraderie, until someone sticks country music on… On a visit, I had an hour to
spare, so I decided to find out if I might be able to log the music activity to
Logentries, and it was surprisingly simple.
After some quick googling, I found a few node.js libraries that interface with
Sonos, and the Sonos HTTP API [https://github.com/jishi/n
6 min
IT Ops
The yellow brick road to machine learning with honeypot data: Our lessons learned
Recently the Rapid7 Logentries [https://logentries.com/get-started/] team
attended a hackathon over at one of our Boston offices. This was a great way for
us to integrate with the other Rapid7 teams within the company and to have fun
messing around with things we don’t usually have time for in a working day.
The project that my team worked on involved machine learning with the dataset
collected by some of the various Heisenberg honeypots that Rapid7 has deployed.
More information about these
3 min
IT Ops
Webinar Recap: Logentries Feature Walkthrough
Our second February webinar was broadcasted & recorded on February 25th 2016.
During this broadcast, Justin Buchanan demonstrated many of the essential
Logentries features.
Below is a summary of some of the features covered. To follow along, or to try
the features for yourself, be sure to create a free Logentries account
[https://logentries.com/get-started/?le_trial=blog-febwebinarwalkrecap].
Query Log Data
Once you successfully get data
[https://logentries.com/resources/how-to-videos/sendin
5 min
IT Ops
The Role of Log Files in Experiments
You have heard, no doubt, of theLean Startup
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous/dp/0307887898/]
. If you need a refresher to place the name, it’s a book, but it’s also a
business trend with such momentum as to have awebsite advertising it as a
“movement.” [http://theleanstartup.com/]And, frankly, that advertisement is
hardly a stretch. The title and the terms coined in it are on everyone’s lips
in the tech industry these days because people at companies of all s
2 min
IT Ops
Infographic: Log Management & Analytics at a Glance
Logentries surveyed over 400 IT professionals about their views of log
management
[https://logentries.com/get-started/?le_trial=survey-infographic-blog] and
analytics. We found that many people are planning on using and investing in
public cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Google
[/2016/02/how-to-compare-google-compute-engine-aws-ec2/], and Azure in 2016.
Who took the survey?
40% of respondents identify as a Developer / Dev Manger, as we expected. We
found the 3% of responses from Support and