Posts tagged IT Ops

4 min IT Ops

Using Event and Log Data to Assure Security and Compliance

All the way back in 2007, security industry analyst and expert Dr. Larry Ponemon of the eponymous institute wrote for Network World [https://web.archive.org/web/20080820033845/http:/www.networkworld.com/news/2007/051507-data-breaches.html] that “data breaches are a pervasive problem for most organizations in the United States today.” Nobody is prepared to argue that this situation has improved much, if at all, 9 years later in 2016. However, those organizations that exert themselves to make t

5 min IT Ops

Moving away from MVC

In of all my years as a software engineer, trying new libraries, frameworks and paradigms has been such a pleasure especially in web development. Even before the well known javascript libraries, web development was based on backend apps which render heavy html code within css and some js code. Frameworks such as spring, .NET MVC, django and rails helped us with abstractions and predone tasks increasing development speed and quality (reuse principles). But, it was not enough. Apps were getting

5 min IT Ops

Avoid These Things When Logging From Your Application

It seems almost strange to talk aboutavoiding things while logging.  After all, logging is your last line of defense or your salvation in many cases.  Some crazy bug in the field that shows up every third full moon?  An external auditor looking at your app’s runtime behavior?  Logging to the rescue. So naturally, is stands to reason that you would want to log just about *everything *your application.  Whenever there’s any doubt, slam a logger call in there and let log level sort out the detai

12 min IT Ops

Designing Data Access Object (DAO) Layer

Overview / Motivation A key part in moving the creation of a product from custom craftsmanship to a repeatable engineering process is the construction of a modular system with decoupling of its components, as well as these components being easily adaptable to inevitable changes. In this blog, I will draw on some of my recent experience of architecting a DAO layer as part of a software system, and how I tried to ensure the development of this system as a healthy and sustainable environment that

5 min IT Ops

Get your work done even faster with the Logentries REST API

Now you can get your work done even faster by automating tasks with the Logentries REST API. With the ability to programmatically query data, manage users, create alerts and integrate third party tools, it’s now easier to finish the job and get on with your day. Table of contents * Query API- Example Usage * Team and User Management API- Example Usage * Tags and Alerts API- Example Usage * LeExportPy- Read More * LeCLI- Read More On-demand Webinar Interested in learning more about the

5 min IT Ops

Hashing Infrastructures

Engineers in fast moving, medium to large scale infrastructures in the cloud are often faced with the challenge of bringing up systems in a repeatable, fast and scalable way. There are currently tools which aid engineers in accomplishing this task e.g. Convection, Terraform, Saltstack, Chef, Ansible, Docker. Once the system is brought up there is a maintenance challenge of continually deploying and destroying the resources. What if we can hash the inputs for describing an infrastructure, where

5 min IT Ops

Logging the Lights in Your Home

It’s all the rage these days under the general heading of “Internet of Things” (IoT), but I have been a home automation enthusiast for more than 10 years now.  In the interceding time, I’ve done experiments and written about the subject.  I even published a Pluralsight course [https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/home-automation-fundamentals], in which I turned a Raspberry Pi into a RESTful server that lets you turn lights in your house on and off using basic X10 technology [https://en.wikipedi

3 min IT Ops

4 Potential Security Issues Raised By Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go is a phenomenon. The game is objectively a success and has been breaking mobile gaming records almost weekly. The game’s current success is without being open in some significant markets and it shows no signs of slowing. It is important to remind players to take measures to protect your company’s interests when playing. Pokémon Go is an Augmented Reality game. Players see the game’s fictional world on top of everyday reality. Augmented Reality manifests in several ways: from import

5 min IT Ops

3 Ways to Improve Your Code Testing

I am a big fan of Test Driven Development [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development] (TDD). I drank the kool-aid a while back and have not had a regret since. When I sling code, I am always writing a test, or writing against a test. That’s how I’m built. I am of the firm belief that one of the best ways to ensure short term and long term code quality is to make sure there that your tests are exercising as much of the code base as possible, as often as possible. Thus, I am always

1 min IT Ops

Integrating Logentries with OpsGenie: 3 Easy Steps

Real-time alerts [https://logentries.com/product/alerting-and-reporting/] are only as good as their ability to successfully reach their intended audience. If an alert recipient only checks email once every several hours, email alerts would not be well suited for real-time notification. It’s for this reason that Logentries makes it easy to integrate with popular 3rd party tools that DevOps professionals are already using, including Slack [https://docs.logentries.com/docs/partner-notifications#

4 min IT Ops

Exporting Logentries data with Leexportpy

Leexportpy, the Logentries utility that exports your log data to 3rd parties, has built-in support for various services such as Kafka, Geckoboard and Hosted Graphite. Without any modification to the current code, you can use these services to extract your Logentries data. To begin, make sure your read-write or read-only API key is correctly placed in the LE section of your configuration file as shown below. Also make sure you have read the first blog post of this series. [/2016/07/introductio

7 min IT Ops

What exactly is an Event-loop?

“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity” – C.A.R Hoare Rather than doing another all-out performance post, I’ll look at some aspects of asynchronous I/O today instead: what it is at a high level, what it isn’t and why you would use it. There aren’t many aspects of programming today that are as saturated with buzzwords and misinformation as asynchronous IO and some of the frameworks which build on top of this. If you work with server code which has to handle a nontri

10 min IT Ops

Introduction to the Logentries Command Line Interface

The Logentries Command Line Interface (CLI) allows you to both manage and use your Logentries service right from the command line. The CLI is built on the Logentries REST APIs [https://docs.logentries.com/docs/rest-api] and provides a tool to interact directly with the Logentries service outside of the UI. It is in beta and currently supports retrieving log events, and performing queries and calculations on log events using our powerful querying language LEQL [https://docs.logentries.com/docs/

4 min IT Ops

Using Logentries With Angular v1.5

The post assumes at least a basic knowledge of Angular.  Angular is a very opinionated framework so make sure you have some experience with Angular before following the instructions presented below. Logentries can integrate into whatever Javascript framework you want to use.  Previously, we examined adding Logentries to a React application [/2016/05/integrating-the-logentries-javascript-library-with-react/].  This post will illustrate how to add Logentries to your Angular v1 application using

3 min IT Ops

Top 5 Questions from the July Walkthrough Webinar

July Walkthrough Webinar was broadcasted & recorded on July 14th 2016. This broadcast included a Logentries demonstration and live Q&A. Below is a sample of some of the questions asked by the audience following the demonstration. To try out the features mentioned below sign up for a Logentries free trial [https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=feature_walkthrough_july16_questions-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=feature_walkthrough_july16_question