Posts tagged IT Ops

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 [http://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 [http://ujzb.beijinggate.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 [http://ujzb.beijinggate.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 [http://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 [http://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 [http://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’ [http://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 [http://ujzb.beijinggate.com/fundamentals/what-is-log-management/] and analytics engine. Today we are