Posts by Rapid7

3 min IT Ops

Logging Your Entire Software Delivery Pipeline

When we think of traditional development and production operations, we often put everything into a linear software delivery pipeline that starts with a development backlog, and ends with production monitoring. We slot tools at each stage, and for the most part, keep everything segmented. Log analysis [http://logentries.com]is a common tool in that chain but where does it fit? At the end? I think not. Log analysis can be used throughout your entire software delivery pipeline. The linear pipeline

4 min IT Ops

Acceptance Tests In Practice - Behavior Driven Development

What is Acceptance Testing? "Acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met.” (Wikipedia definition [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_testing]) In simple words, Acceptance tests check if the software that we have built matches the requirements that were provided. The Magical Black Box Acceptance testing is usually performed using “black box [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box]” testing method. The tester of the system k

3 min IT Ops

Installing Logentries Using Ansible

*This post was written by Logentries [http://logentries.com] customer Richard van den Brand, Software Engineer at Waarneembemiddeling.nl, where he is responsible for developing and maintaining their Symfony2 applications and infrastructure. * In this short tutorial I’ll describe the steps required to install the Logentries agent using Ansible. This tutorial assumes you have some basic knowledge about Ansible and how to use playbooks and roles. If you’re unfamiliar with these topics please co

3 min IT Ops

The Role of Logging in ChatOps

What is ChatOps [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/chatops/] you might ask? Well, if you are like me, you and your team may be already be doing it and you don’t even know it. On a recent visit to San Francisco I was telling one of our tech partners about our new Slack integration [https://logentries.com/logentries-slack-integration-powers-faster-collaboration-real-time-resolution-dev-ops/] when he responded by saying, “Slack and Logentries, cool! Yep everyone is doing ChatOps these days…”

3 min IT Ops

Infographic: Top 4 Log Management Challenges

At Logentries [http://logentries.com] we chat to new users everyday who are looking for an improved solution for centralizing and analyzing their log data. They have often tried rolling their own solution, have previously gone the open source route, or are using an “old school” logging technology. But, what we find across new users, regardless of how they are managing their log data, are some common challenges that have historically made log management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-

4 min IT Ops

Unit testing with Karma and Jasmine for AngularJS

So you’ve started to build applications with AngularJS; or, maybe you’ve done unit testing before but haven’t used it with AngularJS; or, maybe it’s all new to you, but either way this article should help to orient you to the value of using Karma with Jasmine and offer some tips on displaying functionalities of Angular JS. Let’s get started! My app is small it doesn’t need any tests, right? [https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data/] Wrong! A small app can have errors and it’s bad practic

4 min IT Ops

Dynamite Plots, Logs, & the Joy In Knowing

I saw this online and chuckled. I believe it was Mark Twain that said, “Humor is the good natured side of truth.” Well, in my humble opinion, humor can be used as the genesis for interesting blog posts. So, you may be wondering, what do Dynamite Plots, logs and the joy of knowledge have to do with each other? Well, if you have a few minutes, I’ll try to make the link. For me, the humor of the cartoon above is rooted in multiple areas, but most of all in the idea that the data inherently has

3 min IT Ops

Connected QA: Selenium + Log Analysis

Does the idea of adding Quality Assurance (QA) test runs to your log analysis platform sound strange? It’s actually not! The value in adding QA test runs goes beyond helping the QA team; it helps the entire development shop as they move to a DevOps framework. [/content/images/le-img/2014/12/Using-Log-Analyis-for-Selenium-QA-Testing.png] I talk a lot about the integrated development environment and going beyond ad-hoc tool selection to a more deliberate and holistic approach. This also means br

4 min IT Ops

Is Server Monitoring Dead?

Once upon a time one of the first pieces of software you installed on your infrastructure was a server monitoring tool. This was the control panel through which you could view how effectively your infrastructure was being used, akin to the speedometer and temperature gauges on your car, or the dashboard of dials in an airplane’s cockpit. Server monitoring tools usually work by capturing resource usage information from your OS performance API or performance counters (e.g. via proc stats on linu

6 min IT Ops

End-to-End IoT Monitoring with Log Data

A recent blog [/2014/11/what-is-the-role-of-logging-in-the-internet-of-things] explored the importance of logging in general in terms of IoT devices. It also cited predictions that a huge number (50 billion) of IoT devices are expected to exist by 2020. While Machine to Machine(M2M) communication is a related area, the IoT is all about extending the Internet to systems and even low power devices. While there is uncertainty about the exact nature of how these devices will be networked and how th

4 min IT Ops

Best Practices for Cloud Logging, Security, & Data Protection

When we first founded Logentries in 2010 a lot of people thought Viliam Holub (co-founder, CTO, and the brain behind processing billions and billions of log events in real time [https://logentries.com/real-time-log-stream-analytics/]) and I were crazy. The common response was: “People are not going to send their logs to the cloud… logs might contain very sensitive data…” Like typical stubborn founders we persevered in spite of this, and today we have more than 35,000 users across 100 countries

3 min IT Ops

Community Packs for AWS: Out of the Box Dashboards, Alerts, & Queries

We recently released Logentries Community Packs [https://logentries.com/logentries-launches-shareable-community-driven-log-analytics/] , dynamic JSON files that (when uploaded into Logentries [http://logentries.com] ) automatically create Saved queries, Dashboards and Alerts. The true power of these packs is that anyone can create, modify and share them. We called them Community Packs because we want to offer different Communities a “pack” of log analysis features customized for their specifi

5 min IT Ops

Keepalived and HAProxy in AWS: An Exploratory Guide

We’re going to explore high availability and load balancing using Keepalived [http://www.keepalived.org/] and HAProxy [http://www.haproxy.org/]. Keepalived is a routing software designed to provide simple and robust facilities for load balancing and high-availability to Linux systems and Linux-based infrastructures. HAProxy is an open source load balancer/reverse proxy generally used for load balancing web services, but also has the functionality to load balance TCP traffic. Together, Keepali

6 min IT Ops

ES6: Javascript in Harmony: An Overview of New Language Features

ECMAScript 6 brings powerful new capabilities and some tasty syntactical sugar to the ubiquitous Javascript language, as it continues to grab an ever increasing slice of developer mindshare. Now that the ES6 feature set is frozen and just minor refinements will be made over the coming months, much of this new functionality has already landed in modern browsers, and will continue to roll out with each new browser update. For the impatient, there are also now several excellent precompile / polyf

3 min IT Ops

How to Implement JSON Formatting of IIS for Analytics and Troubleshooting

Previously, we wrote about setting up a Windows environment [/2014/11/json-formatting-of-windows-events-its-hot/] to log JSON formatted logs using our Windows Agent or our DataHub.  Now we’ll tackle IIS [http://www.iis.net]. IIS, like Windows, has a unique log format that makes it difficult to read, parse, and garner useful information.  The log is a flat file that has a line-per-web hit; similar to Apache or Nginx. But, it’s not as easy to format intoJSON as Apache and Nginix [/2014/08/json-lo