6 min
Log Management
Taking a Message-Based Approach to Logging
When you think about it, a log entry is really nothing more than a message that
describes an event. As such, taking a message-based approach to logging by
utilizing messaging technologies makes sense. Messaging creates the loose
coupling that allows a logging system to be adaptable to the needs at hand and
extensible over time.
Understanding a Standard Logging Architecture
Typically, logging is implemented in an application using a logger
[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/log
5 min
IT Ops
6 Best Practices for Effective IT Troubleshooting
System monitoring and troubleshooting
[https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/system-monitoring-and-troubleshooting/] can
be a time-consuming and frustrating activity. It’s not unusual for IT folks to
spend hours finding and fixing a problem that could have been resolved in 10
minutes had better troubleshooting tools and processes been in place.
Improving IT troubleshooting and monitoring doesn’t need to be an expensive
undertaking. Many times it’s just a matter of implementing a few company-wide
5 min
Log Management
3 Steps to Building an Effective Log Management Policy
You’re on Call Duty. You’re awoken in the middle of the night by your cell phone
in the throes of an SMS frenzy. You’re getting hundreds of messages from your
company’s logging service: a record is being written to a database, code is
being executed, a new container is being spun up, and on and on. None of these
messages matter to you. You just turn off your phone and go back to sleep.
The next day you go into the office only to find out that half the racks in your
datacenter went offline durin
9 min
InsightOps
3 Core Responsibilities for the Modern IT Operations Manager
In the good old days, IT operations
[https://www.rapid7.com/solutions/it-operations/] managers were responsible for
maintaining the infrastructure, meeting service levels agreements, sticking to
budget, and keeping employees happy. Life was not easy, but at least it was
familiar. You knew your hardware, your software, your employees. You determined
services levels based on what you could actually see and touch. You told people
what to do and they did it. While IT was perceived to be an expensive
7 min
IT Ops
Logging in a Software Defined Network
Background
This blog will give an overview of Software Defined Networks (SDN), present some
suggestions for logging in an SDN and finally present an overview of some
research work we are doing on SDN logging.
If we consider a Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm is a racetrack, SDN
controllers are race cars. Networking vendors especially those in the
telecommunication area such as Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Vodafone use their own
SDN controllers to manage the orchestration of their own equi
4 min
IT Ops
Network Administrator’s Guide to Surviving an Audit: Preparation
Sooner or later, your organization will likely be the subject of an IT audit.
But as ominous as that sounds, it doesn’t have to be something to dread. If
you’re a network administrator, you’ll have a specific role in an audit. Since
audits are rarely small projects, you’ll likely be working with others
throughout the process. The best way to fulfill your specific role well is to be
prepared for an audit before it happens. Simply put, an audit is an examination
to determine if controls are suff
4 min
IT Ops
Log Analysis for System Troubleshooting
Systems of all kinds create log data constantly and voluminously. In searching
out the most compelling reasons to dig into and analyze such data, we compiled a
list of seven reasons that usually drive such activity. In this blog post we
tackle the first of those 7, which include:
1. System troubleshooting
2. Security incident response
3. Security troubleshooting
4. Performance troubleshooting
5. Understanding user behavior or activities
6. Compliance with security policies
7. Complianc
8 min
IT Ops
Roots and Culture: Logging and the Telephone Bill
Telephone systems were the Internet before there was an Internet.
Think about it.
By 1920 millions of people were exchanging data on a worldwide network using a
device that connected on demand. Sounds like the Internet to me.
But unlike the current day Internet, the telephone system cost money to use.
Alexander Graham Bell’s investors wanted it that way. That’s why they gave him
the money. Thus, people who used the telephone system had to pay for it. So
going as far back as 1877, every mont
6 min
IT Ops
5 Rules of Pair Programming Etiquette
I like Pair Programming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming]. I’ve
been doing it episodically for about 10 years. Whenever I’ve pair programmed, at
the end of a session, I’ve always walked away a better developer than when I
started.
However, the practice can be expensive when the pair doing the programming
are not efficient. When a lot of friction exists between the two coders
involved, costs can exceed double that of a single programmer trying to hash
things out on his or her ow
2 min
IT Ops
Java 8 - Lazy argument evaluation
Overview
“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job. Because he will find
an easy way to do it” – Bill Gates
Lazy evaluation is an evaluation strategy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy] which delays the evaluation
of an expression until its value is needed. The opposite of this is eager
evaluation, where an expression is evaluated as soon as it is bound to a
variable.[wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation]]
Like most imperative programming l
4 min
IT Ops
Logs To Understand User Activity and Behavior
Logging user activity is a great way to understand what users are doing, and how
they are using network and computing resources. Collecting data from the
standpoint of a user identity or login is a great way to correlate all kinds of
information, too, including client or workstation activity, network and server
access, and application usage. This provides a unique opportunity to make use of
Logentries’
[https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=user_activity_and_behav
6 min
IT Ops
The Value of Correlation IDs
In the old days when transactional behavior happened in a single domain, in
step-by-step procedures, keeping track of request/response behavior was a simple
undertaking. However, today one request to a particular domain can involve a
myriad of subsequent asynchronous requests from the starting domain to others.
For example, you send a request to Expedia, but behind the scenes Expedia is
forwarding your request as a message to a message broker. Then that message is
consumed by a hotel, airline
5 min
IT Ops
The Generosity of Thought: Caring and Sharing in the Open Source Community
I want to share something with you that is pretty amazing. But, before I do,
allow me to provide the backstory.
The Backstory
I’ve been using Open Source Software (OSS) for a while now. I started with the
big ones, Apache [http://apache.org/], Maven [http://maven.apache.org/], MySQL
[http://www.mysql.com/], etc…. But, as time went on and my work became more
specialized, I started using smaller projects. When you use the big projects
such as Maven and Apache, there’s a boatload of books, video
5 min
IT Ops
Solving the expression problem
If you look at any OO-based codebase of a nontrivial size, you’ll [hopefully]
find well understood behavior formalized and encapsulated through the effective
use of polymorphism- either via interfaces which decouple calling code from a
types’ implementation, or via sub typing to share code common to multiple types.
To take an example from a statically typed language like Java, let’s look at the
Map interface and a few of its implementations in the standard library:
A receiving method which
3 min
InsightOps
Announcing InsightOps - Pioneering Endpoint Visibility and Log Analytics
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 [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-is-log-management/] and
analytics engine.
Today we are