Sumo Logic is excited to join in celebrating the 52nd Earth Day! Earth Day is a global event for environmental awareness, and sustainability, and as well as honoring the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmentalist movement. We believe it's essential now more than ever to move toward greener practices as a business and as people.

As organizations have moved toward a microservices design pattern, the need for reliable and performant solutions that enable decoupled services to communicate with one another has grown. RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker designed for this purpose. We’ll discuss what RabbitMQ is, how it works, why it needs to be monitored and how Sumo Logic can effectively do this.

ActiveMQ is a message-oriented middleware, which means that it is a piece of software that handles messages across applications. It acts as a broker that can help facilitate asynchronous communication patterns like publish-subscribe and message queues. The main goal of those servers is to create a scalable and reliable message bus that different components can use to communicate with each other.

Learn how to use, manage and monitor Amazon Kinesis. Ensure your organization’s data streams are well managed.

Managing the security of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment requires constant vigilance. Your strategy should include identifying potential threats to your environment and proactively monitoring for vulnerabilities and system weaknesses that malicious actors might exploit. In a complex environment – such as your AWS account with a multitude of services, coupled with various architectures and applications – the ideal solution should be both comprehensive and straightforward.

Delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently is critical to the success of modern businesses. Understanding the process and timeframe during which an organization generates new ideas and then designs, develops and deploys them is vital to success.

Over the past decade, the software development landscape has shifted dramatically. Long development cycles resulting in big releases are now a thing of the past. Instead, the focus is on delivering value to the customer quickly and efficiently through small releases delivered at a high frequency.

Sumo Logic SpecOps Situational Brief on the Log4Shell CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability and attempted exploitation observations.

We’re excited to announce updates to Sumo Logic AWS Quick Start Integrations that enable customers to automate the integration of AWS Security Reference Architecture within Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM powered by AWS. The new integrations automate the collection, ingestion, and analysis of applications, infrastructure, security, and IoT data to derive actionable insights for security engineering teams.

Let’s take a look into why and how you should be closely monitoring your Windows server environments from a security perspective. We’ll investigate the types of logs, events and other actions that you should consider. Finally, we’ll look at how you centralize monitoring into a central dashboard, and automate many of the tedious aspects of Windows security monitoring.

Enterprise SOCs are becoming a crucial part of most organizations’ management departments due to the increase in digitization and interconnectivity. SOCs play a major role in monitoring, managing, and responding to security alerts within a company's daily operations. Since cyber attacks have become more sophisticated, the requirements for SOCs have changed due to increased volumes of data, the complexity of security ecosystem tools, and increased data sources and attack vectors. When it comes to efficiency, SOCs need to expand their focus beyond log management and data analytics to include more advanced functionalities such as automation, leveraging big data and AI for intelligent decision support, and increasing visibility into their product through observability.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, or EKS, is a managed Kubernetes service. That means that Amazon Web Services (AWS) handles some of the deployment and management tasks for users. But the fact that EKS is a managed service doesn’t mean that AWS manages all administrative tasks.

HAProxy is one of the fastest and most widely-used load balancing solutions available today. If you’re already using HAProxy, or if you’re considering using HAProxy in your environment, then this is a great place to start. On this page, we discuss HAProxy logging and why logging is such a vital component of the load balancer implementation. We then take a deep dive into the logging offered by HAProxy. Finally, you’ll read about working with the HAProxy logging format and how you can configure the logging to suit your needs better.

Sumo Logic is excited to announce that it has achieved the New York State Department of Financial Services Attestation to support our customers’ abilities to meet privacy and security requirements for critical data.

In this article, we will explain the basic characteristics of Redis, MongoDB, and Cassandra databases. In addition, we will show you how to collect and monitor the logs that these databases produce using Sumo Logic’s unified logs and metrics (ULM) offering and related apps.

It’s not every day that you get four CTOs of leading Cloud companies in a discussion about security, the changing role of the security operations center (SOC), and how best to manage data, artificial intelligence(AI), and service providers in these challenging times. To close out the 2021 Modern SOC Summit, Christian Beedgen, Sumo Logic’s CTO, hosted a discussion with Peter Silberman, CTO at Expel.io, Scott Lundgren, CTO at Carbon Black, and Todd Weber, the CTO at Optiv.

In today's environment, security teams face a pervasive threat landscape, with the expectation that some threat actors will be successful in bypassing perimeter defenses. To deal with this, security teams must learn how to actively hunt down threats, both outside and inside the perimeter, using solutions, such as Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM Enterprise and Continuous Intelligence Platform.

The evolving threat landscape puts pressure on traditional SOCs, igniting the genesis of the next-gen, modern SOC.

In this article we look at how to monitor Cassandra database clusters. We start with the basic architecture of a Cassandra cluster, and mention the most important metrics to gather. Next, we advance step-by-step into configuring and setting up a monitoring stack with Jolokia, Telegraf and Sumo Logic collectors and dashboards – everything you need to monitor Cassandra databases.

Many of our customers today leverage Office 365 GCC High, including organizations looking to meet evolving requirements for working with the United States Department of Defense. Sumo Logic enables customers to leverage our out-of-the-box monitoring and analytics capabilities to analyze Office 365 GCC High data to offer security engineers and security analysts stronger situational awareness of internal employee data.

Security and IT teams may be loath to admit it, but security has historically been mostly a reactive affair. Security engineers monitored for threats and responded when they detected one. They may have also taken steps to harden their systems against breaches, but they didn’t proactively fight the threats themselves.

Threat hunting is emerging as a must-have addition to cybersecurity strategies. By enabling organizations to find and mitigate threats before they ever touch their networks or systems, threat hunting provides the basis for a more proactive security posture – and one that delivers higher ROI on security tools and processes.

Companies generate data at an exponential rate, and the task of analyzing data to produce relevant security insights can be overwhelming. With evolving market dynamics and threat landscapes, security teams have a greater need for integrated and scalable monitoring that provides real-time and meaningful insights into the state of organizational security posture.

Since 2010, it has been Sumo Logic’s mission to democratize machine data. Naturally, we tend to focus on the outcomes: reliable and secure applications and systems that are the engines of successful modern businesses. But to drive these outcomes, and before the spotlight-hogging analytics kick in, algorithms require data. And this is where the magic starts! Sensu has been working on championing a monitoring as code approach to building observability pipelines for a decade now.

It's one thing to detect a cyber attack. It's another to know what the attackers are trying to do, which tactics they are using, and what their next move is likely to be. Without that additional information, it's difficult to defend effectively against an attack. You can't reliably stop an attack if you are unable to put yourself in the mindset of the attackers. This is why threat intelligence plays a critical role in modern cybersecurity operations. Threat intelligence delivers the context about attackers' motives and methods that teams need to react as effectively as possible against threats to their IT resources. Keep reading for a primer on what threat intelligence means, why it's important, and what to consider when implementing a threat intelligence strategy.

At Illuminate, Genesys Cloud principal architect Kal Patel shared how they use Sumo Logic, how they manage it at scale, and some of the lessons they’ve learned in the last year.

At Illuminate 2020, Kashif Iqbal, Head of Corporate Technology and Cyber Security at SEGA Europe, shared their data security challenges and how they currently leverage Sumo Logic for their security needs.

At Sumo Logic Illuminate 2020, The Energy Authority’s IT Director for Service Delivery and Support Scott Follick spoke about the TEA, how they do things, what they have learned in the process of searching for a SIEM solution, and why they chose Sumo.

During Sumo Logic’s Illuminate user conference, Heath Hendrickson, senior security architect at the Clorox company, and Gary Conner, senior threat protection lead, presented how they are leveraging Sumo Logic across security operations, threat hunting, IT operations, and more. 

Observability is arguably the tech buzzword of the year. Whether or not you believe the hype, observability is all about how to ensure overall system health and deliver reliable customer experiences. This is done by observing the system, and when a problem arises, using real-time analytics to quickly help identify the what, where, and why of the problem.

Cathy O’Neil found refuge in mathematics, despite being told by teachers (many of whom were women) that she didn’t need to do math because she was a girl.

What happens when your Medicaid is revoked while you’re in a hospital being treated for cancer? Or what if the state government constantly threatens to take your kids away because you can’t afford antibiotics? Or what if you lose your job and your home and can’t qualify for public assistance?

Log analysis helps organizations determine the best way to optimize application functionality while giving development teams a leg up in root cause analysis. With that said, it’s not feasible to scroll through thousands of lines of log entries in a text editor. Instead, development teams need modern tools that enable them to centralize, filter, and analyze their logs in a way that allows them to glean valuable insights in a time-efficient manner.

Kubernetes, as a platform, is a comprehensive set of tools for orchestrating containers at scale. It consists of a modular architecture of specific components with a defined purpose. For example, the scheduler finds the ideal match for a particular pod and the kube-proxy manages the networking between the nodes and the master.

Log analyzers are software that helps contextualize massive amounts of log data. Log analyzers reduce the amount of time that it takes to perform root cause analysis, and they provide development organizations with valuable insights that help them improve their products for their end users.

Brief introduction to understanding Kubernetes basics. Kubernetes is a broad platform that consists of more than a dozen different tools and components.

“Americans have their minds wrapped around a two-party system. It is hard to get people to envision something different — despite the fact that there have been tectonic changes in the American political parties at many different junctures in our history. Building a new political party from scratch feels daunting and naïve.”

Data increasingly means “people,” down to the preferences of each consumer and voter. That’s why data is so valuable to political campaigns. With good data, you can predict things that haven’t happened yet.

Logging as a Service is a simple, highly scalable solution for managing all of your logs in a central, systematic way. With Logging as a Service, a cloud-based log aggregation tool collects log data from across your infrastructure, consolidates it in a central location, and provides the analytics and visualization tools you need to understand the data in your logs.

Persistence is effectively the ability of the attacker to maintain access to a compromised host through intermittent network access, system reboots, and (to a certain degree) remediation activities. The ability of an attacker to compromise a system or network and successfully carry out their objectives typically relies on their ability to maintain some sort of persistence on the target system/network.

Compared to even just a few years ago, the tools available for data scientists and machine learning engineers today are of remarkable variety and ease of use. However, the availability and sophistication of such tools belies the ongoing challenges in implementing end-to-end data analytics use cases in the enterprise and in production.

Customers regularly ask me what types of data sources they should be sending to their SIEMs to get the most value out of the solution. The driver for these conversations is often because the customers have been locked into a SIEM product where they have to pay more for consumption. More log data equals more money and, as a result, enterprises have to make a difficult choice around what log sources and data are what they guess is the most important. This often leads to blind spots from a logging perspective and requires that your analysts pivot to other tools and consoles to get any additional context and detail they can during an investigation.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you are probably familiar with the recent Shadow Brokers data dump of the Equation Group tools. In that release a precision SMB backdoor was included called Double Pulsar. This backdoor is implemented by exploiting the recently patched Windows vulnerability: CVE-2017-0143.

Edge computing is likely the most interesting section of the broader world of IoT. If IoT is about connecting all the devices to the Internet, edge computing is about giving more processing power to devices at the edge. Edge computing views these edge devices as mini clouds or mini data centers. They each have their own mini servers, mini networking, mini storage, apps running on top of this infrastructure, and endpoint devices. Rather than sending data to the cloud for processing and receiving already-processed data from a central hub in the cloud, in edge computing all the processing happens on the edge device itself, or close to the edge device.

A type of credential reuse attack known as credential stuffing has been recently observed in higher numbers towards industry verticals. Credential stuffing is the process of automated probing of and access to online services using credentials usually coming from data breaches, or bought in the criminal underground.

An ever-increasing number of organizations are working in the cloud. It depends on their business model what cloud delivery model they use. The three most common deployment models for cloud services are software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

In this post, we continue our discussion of use cases involving account take over and credential access in enterprise data sets. In the first part of this series, we introduced the definition of a VIP account as any account that has privileged or root level access to systems/services. These VIP accounts are important to monitor for changes in behavior, particularly because they have critical access to key parts of the enterprise. As a follow up to our first post, this blog will describe a real-time approach for automatically profiling VIP accounts and detecting when they are potentially being misused.

A new kind of spam is being observed in the field that uses the browser notification feature to trick users into subscribing to sites that will in turn bombard users with notifications usually related to click or add profit schemes.

Detecting malicious activity is rarely easy, but some attacker methods are more challenging to detect than others. One of the most vexing techniques to counter is credential theft. Attackers that gain control over a user account have access to the assets of that user.

When thinking about many of the worst data breaches we’ve seen so far, there was one common element: The attacks were not detected while they were active on the internal networks.

System administrators hold many key responsibilities within an IT organization. Most importantly, they must ensure that all systems, services, and applications are up, running, and performing as expected. When a system starts to lag or an application is down, the system administrators are called upon to troubleshoot and resolve the issue as quickly as possible to limit the impact on customers.

In a perfect world, computers would function properly on the network at all times. There would be no issues with the operating system and no problems with the applications. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. System failures can and will occur, and when they do, it is the responsibility of system administrators to diagnose and resolve the issues. But where can system administrators begin the search for solutions when problems arise? The answer is Windows event logs.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto solution for container orchestration. While it has, in some ways, simplified the management and deployment of your distributed applications and services, it has also introduced new levels of complexity.

The last fifteen years have seen huge increases in developer productivity for several reasons, including the arrival of open source into the mainstream and the ability to better emulate target environments. In addition, the process of resetting a development environment back to the last known stable version has been vastly improved by Vagrant and then Docker.

Today's IT and DevOps teams have not one, but two, feature-rich open source Web servers to choose from: NGINX and Apache HTTP Server (which is often called simply "Apache"). At a high level, both platforms do the same core thing: Host and serve Web content. Both also offer comparable levels of performance and security.

Let's take a look at a few strategies you can put in place to mitigate your risk of becoming part of the next ransomware statistic.

Serverless computing is the latest, greatest thing in the technology world. Although the serverless concept has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, the introduction of serverless platforms from major cloud providers—starting with AWS Lambda in 2014—has brought serverless mainstream for the first time.

Serverless computing is becoming more popular as organizations look for new ways to deploy their applications in the cloud. With higher levels of abstraction, easier maintenance, a focus on high performance, and ephemeral workloads, serverless computing solutions like Lambda are finding a permanent place in the mix of cloud infrastructure options.

As DevSecOps continues to redefine the IT security landscape, security is becoming everyone’s responsibility. That means that staying ahead of the latest cybersecurity threats—such as IoT botnets—should be a priority for every DevOps professional.

As multi-cloud architectures grow in popularity, more and more organizations will start asking how to secure multi-cloud environments. Some will conclude that a multi-cloud architecture requires a fundamentally different approach to cloud security.

The principles of data protection are the same whether your data sits in a traditional on-prem data center or in a cloud environment. The way you apply those principles, however, are quite different when it comes to cloud security vs. traditional security. Moving data to the cloud introduces new attack-surfaces, threats, and challenges, so you need to approach security in a new way.

If you have had any exposure to cloud computing or app development in recent years, you likely have heard the term “cloud native” thrown around. But you might be wondering what exactly that term means, and how it differs from concepts such as “cloud ready” or “cloud enabled.”

Internet security, in general, is a challenge that we have been dealing with for decades. It is a regular topic of discussion and concern, but a relatively new segment of internet security is getting the lion’s share of attention—internet of things (IoT). So why is internet of things security… a thing?

Microsoft Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) log files provide valuable information about the use and state of applications running on the web. However, it’s not always easy to find where those files are to determine important aspects of app usage like when requests for servers were made, by whom, and other user traffic concerns.

Cloud networks are popular targets for cybercriminals and organizations will inevitably face them. If you’ve ever administered a network of any type, you know that DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack attempts are really frequent, and there’s loads of malware out there too.

GuardDuty is a threat detection service which constantly monitors the activity in your AWS network for anomalous behavior which could indicate cyber attacks or other unauthorized uses.

What is AWS? Discover the services Amazon offers for making IT design and management simple with AWS.

The way we all experience and interact with apps, devices, and data is changing dramatically. End users demand that apps are responsive, stable, and offer the same user experience no matter which platform they are using. To build these well, many developers consider creating cross-platform apps. Although building a separate native app per platform is a preferred approach for mass market consumer apps, there are still a lot of situations where it makes more sense to go cross-platform. In this post I’ll look at the most popular strategies a developer faces when it comes to building a mobile app, and some tools that help you to build well. Mobile Web Apps This is probably the most easiest way onto a mobile device. Mobile web apps are hosted on a remote server and built using identical technologies to desktop web apps: HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. The primary difference is that it will be accessed via mobile device’s built-in web browser, which may require you to apply responsive web design principles to ensure that the user experience is not degraded by the limited screen size on mobile and that would be costly to build and maintain. The cost of applying responsive design principles to a web site may be a significant fraction of developing a mobile app. Native Mobile Apps Native apps are mainly developed using the device’s out-of-the-box SDK. This is a huge advantage as you have full access to the device’s API, features, and inter-app integration. However it also means you need to learn Java to build Apps for Android, Objective-C for iOS, and C# for Windows phones. Whether you are a single developer or working with a company and multi team skills, learning to code in multiple languages is costly and time-consuming. And most of the time, all features will not be available on every platform. Cross-Platform Mobile Apps Cross-platform apps have somewhat of a reputation of not being competitive against native apps, but we continue to see more and more world class apps using this strategy. Developers only have to maintain a single code base for all platforms. They can reuse the same components within different platforms, and most importantly, developers can still access the native API via native modules. Below are some tools that support building cross-platform apps: PhoneGap Owned by Adobe, PhoneGap is a free resource and handy to translate HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code. Once the app is ready, the community will help in reviewing the app and it is supported all major platforms including BlackBerry. Xamarin.Forms With a free starter option, Xamarin.Forms is great tool for C# and Ruby developers to build an app cross-platform with the option of having access to native platform’s API. The a wide store of component to help achieve the goal faster. Xamarin has created a robust cross platform mobile development platform that’s been adopted by big names like Microsoft, Foursquare, IBM, and Dow Jones. Unity 3D This tool is mainly focused on building game apps, and very useful when graphics is most important detail in it. This cross platform mobile development tool goes beyond simple translation. After developing your code in UnityScriptor or C#, you can export your games to 17 different platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, Web, Playstation, Xbox, Wii and Linux. When it comes to building an app, whether cross-platform or not, views and thoughts always differ. My preference is cross-platform for one main reason; it is less time-consuming - that is critical because I can then focus on adding new features to the app, or building another one. About the Author Mohamed Hasni is a Software Engineer focusing on end-to-end web and mobile development and delivery. He has deep experience in building line of business applications for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Here at Sumo Logic we’ve been talking a lot about the shift to Continuous Intelligence, and how software-centric companies and traditional organizations alike are being disrupted by traditional IT models. A newly commissioned white paper by the Enterprise Strategy Group, digs into the future of full-stack system management in the era of digital business. The author and Principle Analyst, Application Development and Deployment, Stephen Hendrick, examines the opportunity and challenge IT faces as an active participant in creating new, digital business models. “The opportunity centers on IT’s ability to create new business models and better address customer needs, while the challenge lies in it’s role as a disruptive force to establish enterprises that underestimate the power and speed of IT-fueled change.” Digital business models are fueling the growing acceptance of cloud computing and DevOps practices, resulting in new customer applications that are transforming many traditional markets into digital disruptors – Amazon, AWS, AirBnB, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Twitter, and Uber spring to mind as common examples. However, the rise of cloud-computing and continuous development and delivery practices also results in greater complexity and change within IT environments. Stephen discusses the emergence of technologies to address this trend. In addition, he introduces a Systems Management Reference model to analyze the role and relevance of continuous intelligence technologies to increase the adaptability of full-stack system management, thereby better serving the dynamic needs of the IT infrastructure and business. Stephen concludes, “continuous intelligence brings together the best that real-time, advance analytics has to offer by leveraging continuous real-time data to proactively support the evaluation of IT asset availability and performance within a highly secure environment. This approach reflects and is aligned with today’s modern architecture for application development and deployment, which includes microservices and immutable infrastructure.” Where does Sumo Logic fit into all of this? Quite simply we believe Sumo Logic’s purpose-built, cloud-native, machine data analytics service was designed to deliver real-time continuous intelligence across the entire infrastructure and application stack. This in turn enables organizations to answer questions they didn’t even know they had, by transforming the velocity, variety and volume of unstructured machine data overwhelming them into rich, actionable insights, to address and diffuse complexity and risk.