Posts tagged Logentries

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://kql3.us1788.com/fundamentals/what-is-log-management/] and analytics engine. Today we are

5 min IT Ops

Node.js as a Proxy to Logentries.com

Logging from the client side of a web application can seem like a challenge.  The web browser exposes everything to the user.  There is no way to hide anything delivered to the client from prying eyes, including your log token to your Logentries [http://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=nodejs_as_a_proxy-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=nodejs_as_a_proxy&utm_source=logentries_blog&utm_medium=post_cta&utm_content=create_trial] log.  There is no relia

4 min IT Ops

Goodbye to the VCR: Rewinding Down Memory Lane

The VHS tape was a thing of a magic that is alien in the world of on-demand media.  It represented a promise of entertainment. A promise only realized when loading the tape into the player and pressing the play button. There was an air of excitement around every video, and you could never be entirely certain about what the video contained. I was reminded of the mystique of the VCR just this month when I read about its final demise.  Funai Electric, the last major manufacturer of VCR players,

3 min IT Ops

Widely-used Android App Leaks MS Exchange Credentials

In October, Rapid7 researchers [http://community.us1788.com/community/infosec/blog/2016/10/11/r7-2016-21-nine-folders-certificate-validation-vulnerability-cve-2016-2533] uncovered a significant vulnerability in the Nine mobile application [http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ninefolders.hd3&hl=en] for Android. Baldly stated, this app leaks Microsoft Exchange user credentials, plus mail envelopes and attachments, mailbox synchronization data, caleandar entries and tasks to attac

4 min IT Ops

Overview of 'online' algorithm using Standard Deviation example

Here at Logentries [http://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=online_algorithm-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=online_algorithm&utm_source=logentries_blog&utm_medium=post_cta&utm_content=create_trial] we are constantly adding to the options for analysing log generated data. The query language ‘LEQL’ [http://logentries.com/resources/how-to-videos/building-a-query/] has a number of statistical functions and a recent addition has been the new Standard