AWS re:Invent is one of the biggest events Sumo Logic partakes in each year. If you’re not familiar, it’s one of the hottest cloud shows with over 25,000 attendees, more than 400 sessions, hands on labs, boot camps and much more! We’ve been lucky to be apart of it for the last few years and it just seems to get bigger and better. In just a few short weeks we’ll be headed back to Vegas and have a few things up our sleeves! Here are some tips, tricks and all the fun activities that you can expect. As Scar from the Lion King would say… Be Prepared! Whether you’re a veteran of re:Invent or a newbie, you can never be too prepared to survive the week. Here’s some useful tips we’ve picked up along the way: Make sure to plan your schedule and session times in advance. This year AWS has introduced “Reserved Seating” for sessions so you can secure your spot! More details here. If you’re looking for a new t-shirt wardrobe make sure to visit the expo hall. Vendors basically throw them at you. But honestly, some really cool stuff goes down in there! Check out the re:Play party on Thursday night, it’s always a different setup and they announce the musical guest that day. Wonder who it’ll be? Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate and have fun! Expo Hall Madness The expo hall is a lively and happening place with over 400 vendors showcasing the best cloud services. Last year we had half a ton of sumo wrestlers that made quite a splash there and you can be sure that we’ll bring the same excitement to re:Invent this year. Visit our booth #604, to see how machine data analytics can give you the continuous intelligence you need to build, run and secure you modern applications. We will have a bunch of activities, plenty of swag, and live demos and face time with the whole Sumo crew! Learn from the Best If you’re looking to get practical advice on how developers and operators can leverage data analytics to gain critical information about their modern application then you should check out our session on Wednesday afternoon at 11:00am. Our own CTO, Christian Beedgen and Ben Newton, Principal Product Manager, along with Cloud Cruiser will take you in depth on Effective Application Data Analytics for Modern Applications. Make sure to reserve your seat! Get Social with Sumo! Whether or not you’re attending re:Invent, you can participate and follow all of the conversations from the event! We will be live blogging from relevant keynotes and sessions, posting videos, photos and hosting a fun #SumoAfterDark photo contest (think roaming gnome). Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn for all the latest. Check out our AWS re:Invent page for more details.

At Misfit Wearables, we’ve been using Sumo Logic with great success and we wanted to share our story. We create smart devices that promote fitness and wellness. In order to develop great devices, capturing and analyzing data are critical tasks. We previously used a well-known open source log management tool. This tool was slow, limited and didn’t really deliver the value that we were looking for, yet for some time we had come to merely accept what we configured it to do for us. When we made the change to Sumo Logic, we saw some big changes. In summary Sumo Logic is an effective tool to manage logs and analyze data and is widely used by all our engineers in Misfit. However it goes way beyond that. The feedback from our product team has been tremendous and the main thing that is different is performance. Today, with Sumo Logic running in our environment, a job that once took five to ten minutes now takes several seconds. That was the beginning of our Sumo Logic story, because we are now implementing the Partition feature throughout our environment, and we’re already seeing results. Partitions has taken us to another level of performance improvement.

We had no consolidated strategy to analyze our logs, across our systems and applications alike. As a result and especially because of our rapid growth, troubleshooting and event correlation became manual and increasingly painful affairs that involved looking at individual server and application logs. We tried internal tools including syslog-ng and rsyslog, but the maintenance and overhead costs on a lean IT team were too high.

The below is a guest post from CloudPassage. Automating your server security is about more than just one great tool – it’s also about linking together multiple tools to empower you with the information you need to make decisions. For customers of CloudPassage and Sumo Logic, linking those tools to secure cloud servers is as easy as it is powerful. The CloudPassage Halo Event Connector enables you to view security event logs from CloudPassage Halo in your Sumo Logic dashboard, including alerts from your configuration, file integrity, and software vulnerability scans. Through this connector, Halo delivers unprecedented visibility of your cloud servers via your log management console. You can track server events such as your server rebooting, shutting down, changing IP addresses, and much more. The purpose of the Halo Event Connector is to retrieve event data from a CloudPassage Halo account and import it into Sumo Logic for indexing or processing. It is designed to execute repeatedly, keeping the Sumo Collector up-to-date with Halo events as time passes and new events occur. The Halo Event Connector is free to use, and will work with any Halo subscription. To get started integrating Halo events into Sumo Logic, make sure you have set up accounts for CloudPassage Halo and Sumo Logic. Then, generate an API key in your CloudPassage Halo portal. Once you have an API key, follow the steps provided in the Halo – Sumo Logic documentation, using the scripts provided on Github. The documentation walks you through the process of testing the Halo Event Connector script. Once you have tested the script, you will then add the output as a “Source” by selecting “Script” in Sumo Logic (see below). When you have finished adding the new data source that integrates the Halo Event Connector with Sumo Logic (as detailed in the .pdf documentation), you will be taken back to the “Collectors” tab where the newly added Script source will be listed. Once the Connector runs successfully and is importing event data into Sumo Logic, you will see Halo events such as the following appear in your Sumo Logic searches: Try it out today – we are eager to hear your feedback! We hope that integrating these two tools makes your server security automation even more powerful.