Posts by Rapid7

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

3 min IT Ops

How To Monitor Windows with Logentries

We are often asked at Support questions such as, “How do we use Logentries to monitor Windows performance stats?” or “Can Logentries get alerts based on CPU utilization on Windows?” The simple answer is yes, with the help of our Logentries Agent for Windows [https://logentries.com/doc/agent/] and PowerShell we can. Here is a 5 minute tutorial to get you monitoring your CPU, Memory and Disk Space [https://Logentries.com/product/why-use-us/] with Logentries. Installing the Logentries Agent You

6 min IT Ops

How to Configure Rsyslog with Any Log File; Agents Bad...No Agents Good...

Last week I wrote “In Defense of the Agent [/2013/12/in-defense-of-the-agent/].” One of the main advantages of using agents is the ability to easily get the agent configured to monitor logs of any type [https://Logentries.com/product/why-use-us/] no matter where those logs live on your file system. We posted the article on Reddit and there were some interestingcomments [http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1sjyic/in_defense_of_the_agent/] and discussion – it’s fairly obvious that there is

3 min IT Ops

5 Uses for Log Data That You Never Thought Of

When you think of logs, what do you think of? It’s most likely troubleshooting software applications and the infrastructure that underlies them, keeping an eye on your production apps…perhaps even database logs and some other things like that. Traditional log management [https://logentries.com/] stuff…I’m guessing it’s not sports cars, law enforcement, lighting, marketing metrics, and beer. Well guess what? It can be! 1) Fact Check a Journalist Back in February of 2013 The New York Times publis

4 min

Logentries Add-Ons for Heroku Environment pt. 1 – CloudAMQP

We recently announced ouradd-on program at Logentries [https://logentries.com/doc/addons/], which allows third party vendors to send their log data toLogentries [https://logentries.com/]< and to highlight important events for their users via ourtagging, alerting and reporting features [https://logentries.com/product/features/]. This allows vendors to predefine what log events their users really need to know about and if there are particular thresholds that indicate trouble may be looming. Users

5 min IT Ops

Log Management 101 - Where Do Logs Come From?

We’ve had a lot of people asking for the Log Management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-is-log-management/] Primer for a while now. And, surprisingly, many of these folks have a strong technical background, including developers. Some want it for themselves, and some want it to pass on to a colleague, manager, etc. I’m going to explain what logs are, where they come from and how you can get your logs. If you’re a developer, this post probably isn’t for you as we don’t dig into the code

3 min IT Ops

Where Are My AWS Logs?

Over my time at Logentries, we’ve had users contact us about where to find their logs while they were setting up Logentries [https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=aws_logs-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=aws_logs&utm_source=logentries_blog&utm_medium=post_cta&utm_content=create_trial] . As a result, we recently released a feature for Amazon Web Services called the AWS Connector, which automatically discovers your log files across your Linux EC2 ins

3 min IT Ops

How to Easily Get All Your Logs from AWS EC2

Let’s say that you, like many of your colleagues, are hosting your application on AWS’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. You’re chugging along at a steady rate of growth when BAM! One day you get a spike of traffic and have to scale up quickly. “Good job,” you think as you pat yourself on the back in your mind, “this choice to host in the cloud means we can easily handle this load spike without a problem. We’ve set it to auto-scale, so we’ll have all the instances we need.” But is everything all good?

4 min IT Ops

How To Track Peak Load and Memory Usage vs Response Time on Heroku

A few months back Heroku introduced log-runtime-metrics, which you can enable [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/log-runtime-metrics#enabling] from the command line to insert CPU load and memory usage metrics into your log events at 20 second intervals. Like all log data in its raw format it’s not massively useful to see metrics getting dumped into your logs every 20 seconds. That’s not exactly what Heroku had in mind, however. At the same time they introduced log-runtime-metrics, Heroku al

5 min IT Ops

How To Receive Log Alerts Via Flashing Lights In Your Office or Home

This is a guest blog post by Jason Ruane, the technical director atMoposa [http://www.moposa.com/], a place for brides and grooms to plan and manage their wedding. In this post Jason describes how he used a Wi-Fi enabled light and Logentries alerts to receive Logentries alerts via flashing lights in his house. Jason and his team are long time users of Logentries, analyzing all their logs from multiple servers in one centralized, cloud location. How I receive my Logentries alerts via home lighti

2 min IT Ops

How to Log Client-side JavaScript Events – Logging for the Web with le.js

At Logentries we provide a comprehensive collection of client libraries [https://github.com/logentries]and inputs [https://logentries.com/doc/inputs/] which make it easy to dispatch log events from any tier in your existing infrastructure. Until now though, one platform has been left out, and it’s the most ubiquitous and widely-understood of all- the browser. Collecting events from the browser presents a number of challenges which have hindered the development of a viable solution: * There’s n

2 min IT Ops

Field-level search

Back in July we announced a substantial improvement to our search functionality, searching your log data with logical operators [/2013/07/searching-with-logical-operators/]. Today we are happy to announce another big step in improving our search facility. You can now perform ** field-level searches [https://logentries.com/doc/search/]**in Logentries. Field-level searches allow you to search for events where a particular field is equal to, less than or greater than a particular value and thus al

3 min IT Ops

Build your own SMS Alerts--Logentries and Clickatell Combined!

* [/content/images/le-img/2013/07/Moposa2.jpg] This is a guest blog post by Jason Ruane, the technical director at Moposa [http://www.moposa.com/], a place for brides and grooms to plan and manage their wedding. In this post Jason, describes how he used Logentries webhook alerts and Clickatell to receive Logentries alerts via SMS. Jason and his team are long time users of logentries, analyzing all their logs from multiple servers in one centralized, cloud location. How I receive my Logentries

3 min IT Ops

How to Best Structure your Logs: Log Analysis Tips and Best Practices with Gal Segal from eToro

This week we have a guest blog post by Gal Segal. Gal is an engineer at eToro [https://www.etoro.com/en/platforms/openbook/], the worlds Largest Social Trading & Investment Network. In this post Gal shares his thoughts on log analysis best practices including tips on how best to structure your logs as well as some useful patterns that can be applied within your log events. He also discusses how to use Logentries’ new log search [https://logentries.com/doc/search/] functionality to more easily