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Showing posts from October, 2022

Using AWS Systems Manager and Patch Groups

 This is a way to manage your cloud setup and use patch your AWS infrastructure in a way that meets certain parameters. There are multiple operating systems you can choose from; It's the equivalent of saying "Hey, I have a Linux machine here; So search though all of the Linux options only and see if my particular Instance needs a patch." Or "Here's a group of Windows Servers; Check for patches once a week and let me know." If you have multiple instances with multiple instances, you can put those into Patch Groups and designate a OS to each, however, an instance can only be in one AWS Patch Group (PG) at a time. The most challenging part was simply setting things up. I did this in two accounts: In my root account, with the help of this video on YouTube, I simply put in instances, applied patches easily. In an IAM account, I had to have multiple permissions, and even then it took about 2 days for the instances to be acknowledged and for me to have patches atta

Log Sorting with AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights

 The cool thing is, I was contracted to make these videos to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See these links to go to the DataDog and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     CloudWatch     The syntax is odd, but easy to grasp. Sort log data by IP addresses, message codes, and status codes. The simplest query system, but not quite robust.   Insights       The syntax has changed - Vastly. I see major SQL influences. You can see that in how the parse function works - in this case, it's often taken pieces of a pre-existing standard - in this case, message - and breaking them into their own categories you can reference.    The functionality seems to be relevant for a different set of da

Log Sorting With New Relic

 The nifty thing is, I was contracted to make these videos to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging and data visualization - CloudWatch, CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See the following links to go to the CloudWatch , CloudWatch Insights , and DataDog posts.   NewRelic   I expected this to be easier than the previous two and it's rather dense in its information at first glance, although you an adjust it to show real-time analytics.  Documentation is reasonable and concise; One could gather the basics of the syntax quickly. Opening a singular log entry and clicking the elements of it to include or exclude from a new query was very helpful. check out the video for how I did error tracking. The GUI is my favorite; Sleek and modern, and yet it will change sometime in mid-October 2022.      

Log Sorting With DataDog

   The nifty thing is, I was contracted to make these videos to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - CloudWatch, CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See the following links to go to the CloudWatch , CloudWatch Insights , and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     ...There's a lot of information.  And a lot of ways to sort it. What's the difference between Patterns and Transactions? The Live Tail setting is pretty cool. Would be very helpful in making you panic if there was some kind of incident and you got a ton of error logs, but then you can sort by patterns and get a bit more insight into what is failing or being attacked. You can see in my video that I had to adjust the viewport, as there was a lot of information on the