Logentries recently announced the availability of “anomaly detection and inactivity alerting” as part of its cloud-based log management platform. The newly available anomaly detection functionality allows customers to proactively identify aberrant system or user behavior toward the end of resolving issues as expeditiously as possible. In addition to using Logentries to store log data and run customized analytics to understand machine data-related trends, Logentries now delivers alerts and notifications that notify IT administrators about anomalous behavior as exemplified by potential security breaches, malfunctioning infrastructure components or underperforming applications. The platform’s push-based notifications leverage machine-learning technology that iteratively increases its understanding of the typical behavior of a specific IT infrastructure inclusive of seasonal or even daily and hourly fluctuations in user activity and its corresponding machine data. To set up alerts, customers specify tags that are applied to incoming log data that can be used to create real-time alerts that are received via “text, PagerDuty, HipChat, Campfire, and other webhook APIs.” Alerts and notifications can also be created by means of the Logentries Open API that allows users to transmit log data from select devices with the Logentries platform. Overall, Thursday’s announcement marks a significant addition to the Logentries platform’s suite of features and functionality by providing out of the box alerts and notifications in contrast to the customized identification of exceptions by means of business intelligence platforms such as Tableau. Expect Logentries to continue building out its analytics and data visualization functionality for machine data as it attempts to deliver a nimbler and simpler alternative to machine data analytics vendors such as Splunk.
Cloud Computing Today 