Posts by Rapid7

15 min IT Ops

How to Compare Google Compute Engine & AWS EC2

Which Virtual Machine is Best: Google’s Compute Engine or Amazon’s EC2? It Depends. The Internet might seem like a Wild West of chaotic connections because it often is. Companies like Google and Amazon have been managing to create order out of the chaos for years by understanding the nature of the World Wide Web. Within the last 10 years, Google and Amazon have leveraged that understanding into a robust suite of product offerings in the field of Infrastructure-as-a- Service, or IaaS. The corn

3 min Automation and Orchestration

What is Security Orchestration?

The best security operation centers (SOCs) [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/] are built on efficiency and speed-to-response. But if you’ve ever worked in a SOC or on a security team, you know it’s tough to get your security systems, tools and teams to integrate in a way that streamlines detection, response, and remediation. One of the most tedious tasks of all is cobbling together alert details to assess if a security event is a real threat, along with correlating

5 min Javascript

Client Side Logging In Javascript

Developers are writing Javascript applications of increasing complexity designed to run in web browsers, on desktops, and on servers.  Javascript applications have reached a level of maturity that means they are running important business operations.  They must be more maintainable and supportable now that they have achieved this level of responsibility in the enterprise.  Javascript applications should be expected to provide the same information for support and maintenance as any other applic

1 min IT Ops

Infographic: What scares IT Professionals most about IT Infrastructure

Download Now [http://info.logentries.com/logentries-download-infographic-it-infrastructure] Logentries surveyed IT Professionals identifying themselves as members of Information Technology Teams, Operations Teams, and Development Teams Asking them: “What scares you the most about your IT infrastructure?” The answers highlighted Security concerns, System Failure, Operational costs, and the complexities of SDN (Software Defined Networking). We saw many responses reinforcing the need to conti

6 min IT Ops

Do You Still Email Yourself from Your Code? How to Stop the Madness

A few years back now, I took on an assignment to help a company modernize a series of legacy .NET applications.  One of these did some back office processing.  A vendor would stick some files on a shared drive, and a windows scheduled task would invoke this bit of code to parse the file, apply a whole slew of business rules to its contents, and then update the appropriate internal systems.  The details are both proprietary and uninteresting, so I will spare you those. The author of this appli

13 min IT Ops

The 4 Steps for Creating a Log Enabled Marketing Campaign

Typically, most logging activity in the online world is concerned with collecting information about an enterprise’s digital infrastructure. Machine logs, application logs, network logs, database logs, access logs are a few examples of such activity. However, as marketing campaigns become more integrated into application activity, using log data to monitor and to measure the effectiveness of a campaign is a viable extension of an enterprise’s current logging activity. But, we need to beware.

5 min IT Ops

Brics Vs RE2/J

By Benoit Gaudin and Mark Lacomber Regular Expressions When it comes to searching unstructured data, regular expressions are a very useful and powerful tool. The power provided by popular regular expression libraries does come with a significant performance cost in some cases though, both when compiling regular expressions into automata (state explosion problem when determinising automata) and when using these automata to match input. These constraints are usually acceptable for individuals ne

5 min IT Ops

A point of @Contention- cache coherence on the JVM

Java 8’s major changes- lexical closures, the stream API, e.t.c have overshadowed a slew of little gems, one of which I only discovered the other day- the @Contended annotation. False Sharing Chances are you’re reading this on a device with more than one CPU. There’s therefore also quite a good chance the you have more than one thread of execution running at the exact same time. There’s an equally good chance that some of your fancy multiprocessor CPU’s on-die memory (aka L2/3 cache) is share

4 min IT Ops

Deciphering MySQL Logs: The What, Why, and How

Logs are one of the best ways to understand what a server is doing. Thankfully, MySQL has no shortage of log activity to assist a DBA in its maintenance. It writes out its activity to 5 different logs.  This post will take a look at the existing MySQL logs and how they assist the administrator. * On Windows, - The log is written to the data directory with a .err extension even if not explicitly enabled. * Errors are automatically written to the Event Log. This behavior is standard and

5 min IT Ops

The Role of Log Files in Experiments

You have heard, no doubt, of theLean Startup [http://www.amazon.com/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous/dp/0307887898/] .  If you need a refresher to place the name, it’s a book, but it’s also a business trend with such momentum as to have awebsite advertising it as a “movement.” [http://theleanstartup.com/]And, frankly, that advertisement is hardly a stretch.  The title and the terms coined in it are on everyone’s lips in the tech industry these days because people at companies of all s

5 min IT Ops

TypeScript Language Primer

What is TypeScript? TypeScript is an open source typed superset of JavaScript [https://logentries.com/doc/javascript/] which compiles to plain JavaScript. Many people have considered JavaScript’s loose typing as a problem, but now TypeScript offers a solution to that. Specifically, TypeScript allows you to code with decorators/annotations, classes, interfaces, private properties and typing compliance. We also might say that TypeScript is ES6 with some extra options. What does TypeScript do?

8 min IT Ops

IOT made real - Using TI SensorTag data with Logentries and NodeRed

Learn how to send IoT Data from the TI CC 2650 SensorTag to Logentries (using Node-Red). This is the first of a series of IoT blogs that show you how easy it can be to integrate a range of real sensor devices with Logentries and how to use the data from those devices once it is in Logentries. This follows the earlier blog [/2014/12/end-to-end-iot-monitoring-with-log-data/] showing why a centralised logging service would be useful for IoT developers and users. This series of blogs will show ju

5 min IT Ops

Troubleshooting with Nexpose Logs

Nexpose [http://www.rapid7.com/products/nexpose/index.jsp] is the industry standard in Vulnerability Management, giving you the confidence you need to understand your ever-changing attack surface, focus on what matters, and create better security outcomes. [/2016/02/troubleshooting-with-nexpose-logs/] Table of contents * Where are the Nexpose logs located? * Setting up the Logentries Agent * Analyzing the logs- mem.log * nsc.log * auth.log * Get started -------------------------------

2 min IT Ops

Using Logs for Security & Compliance: Part 3

This 3-part series explores the critical role logs play in maintaining regulatory compliances and provides specific examples of known events to look for an how to evaluate different compliance tools. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [http://info.logentries.com/using-logs-to-address-compliance-standards] When it comes to PCI Compliance [https://www.rapid7.com/solutions/compliance/pci-dss/], simply collecting and storing your logs isn’t enough.

5 min IT Ops

Considering the Explosive Growth of Log Analytics

You’d have to be living in a cave to not know that the practice of log analytics in corporate IT has grown dramatically in the last 10 years. This explosion in logging activities over the recent years is due to two factors, the maturing of log technology and the expanded application of logging to new information domains such as tracking user behavior, tracking page views, and tracking API interaction, to name a few such activities. As logging technology matures, the price goes down. Getting a