The Hoot from Humio

In this episode, Humio's Ashish Chakrabortty interviews Daniel Alvizu, DevOps Manager at Swirlds Labs. Learn how to improve your DevOps environment, key metrics to monitor, actionable steps to reduce your MTTD and MTTR, and much more!

Hear the latest cybersecurity trends, how security products are evolving and a deep dive into XDR in this podcast episode featuring Brian Trombley, VP of Product Management at CrowdStrike and Huzaifa Dalal, Head of Product Marketing at Humio.  Listen to learn: How the market is defining XDR How to differentiate between XDR, SIEM and SOAR About CrowdStrike Falcon XDR  How Humio enhances Falcon XDR 

Tune in to learn how Humio's platform takes a unique, modern approach to observability through index-free log management. The discussion features Andrew Latham, Senior Sales Engineer at Humio, a CrowdStrike company, and Keyauri Kendrick, Technical Marketing Engineer at Humio, a CrowdStrike company. 

Tune in to learn how the Corelight and Humio platforms work together to deliver the data and context needed to optimize threat hunting. The discussion features Todd Wingler, Global Senior Director of Alliances, Corelight; John Smith, Director, Technical Marketing Engineer at Humio, a CrowdStrike Company; and Ken Greene, Strategic Alliances Director at Humio, a CrowdStrike company. 

Tune in to learn about CrowdStrike's core values and how the company's story is continuing to evolve, including through acquisitions, in this discussion with JC Herrera, Chief Human Resources Officer, CrowdStrike, and Huzaifa Dalal, Head of Product Marketing at Humio, a CrowdStrike company.

Caitlynne Kezys, Instana Technical Solutions Specialist at IBM, shares the value of application observability. Listen to our most recent podcast interview here!

Tune in to hear insights on the importance of logging everything, including the evolution of log management, the data it provides to security teams, and predictions for log management in 2022 in this discussion with Sameer Vasanthapuram, Principal Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services, and Ashish Chakrabortty, Technical Marketing Engineer at Humio. Sameer and Ashish will also be part of Humio's Advanced Log Management Course Spring ‘22, kicking off February 3rd. 

Tune in to hear how Hewlett Packard Enterprise is leveraging Humio's modern log management platform to enhance visibility, achieve root cause analysis, and drive context and correlation across its entire infrastructure in this discussion with Allwyn Lobo, Vice President of Cloud Ops & Release Engineering at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and Joseph Mattioli, VP Emerging Technology Sales at CrowdStrike.

In this episode of The Hoot, Joe Tibbetts, Senior Director, Tech Alliances & API at Mimecast, shares how Humio and Mimecast created a platform integration designed to deliver email-based threat intelligence with advanced detection and investigation capabilities. Hear how the Humio and Mimecast integration empowers customers with the data needed for more thorough search and correlation capabilities across all log types to better detect and respond to advanced cyber threats. 

In this episode of The Hoot, John Smith, Principal Sales Engineer at ExtraHop, joins Huzaifa Dalal, Head of Product Marketing for Humio at CrowdStrike, to discuss his experience as one of the early users of Humio Community Edition, including the unique benefits it provides as a streaming log management solution that offers the industry's highest no-cost ingestion rates and retention with ongoing access. 

In this episode of The Hoot, Adam Hogan, Director of Sales Engineering at CrowdStrike, joins Huzaifa Dalal, Head of Product Marketing for Humio at CrowdStrike, to discuss Falcon Data Replicator (FDR), Humio Community Edition, and how Falcon and Humio, together, are empowering customers with deep, contextual, index-free analytics at speed and scale.

Logging everything gives organizations the power to answer anything, and for George Kurtz, CEO and CO-Founder of CrowdStrike, “We found that Humio had the best technology, the best team, tons of scalability features and was really unique in the industry, and we thought that was a game changer for us.” In this episode of The Hoot, you'll hear about CrowdStrike's evolving story as a company, including its passion for customers, conviction around cloud-first, the value of speed, and the importance of the Humio platform for giving organizations streaming observability at scale.

In this episode of The Hoot, Gregory Bell and Geeta Schmidt discuss empowering security teams with better network data to detect and resolve threats faster.

In this episode of The Hoot, join Geeta Schmidt, VP & Humio Business Unit Lead at Crowdstrike, as she speaks with Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder at LaunchDarkly, about development strategies that empower your teams to quickly create software to match the speed of modern business.

In this episode of The Hoot, join Geeta Schmidt, VP & Humio Business Unit Lead at CrowdStrike, as she speaks with Tracey Welson-Rossman, founder of TechGirlz and CMO at a leading IT consulting firm, about her experiences as a female executive in the early days of the tech industry. Tracey shares her experiences breaking into tech as a woman and loving its pace of innovation. She discusses her inspiration for founding TechGirlz, which has helped over 25,000 young women learn and become involved in the technology industry. 

In this episode of The Hoot, we talk with Kristian Nørgaard, Lead Consultant IS IoT Solutions at Grundfos about his organization's digital transformation as the company moves to software-based solutions, and the need to observe and log data in real-time.  Kristian shares how Grundfos has a goal to lower the world's energy footprint, and why digitalization is a strategic objective to help meet this goal. With this in mind, his company has been transitioning to software-based solutions to couple its physical pump offerings, which in turn, has driven the need for a full view into everything happening within their software.  As Grundfos made the move to the cloud and IoT technology, they selected Humio for its unique abilities to capture and log a broad array of data in real-time, provide live dashboards for data visualization, and easily scale with the rapid growth of the business. 

This is part two of a series featuring James Yeager, Vice President of Public Sector and Healthcare at CrowdStrike and Andrew Harris, Sr. Director, Public Technology Strategy at CrowdStrike sharing insights on the recent Cybersecurity Executive Order, the value of log data and the ability to analyze and integrate that data with other tools, traditional logging cost constraints, and the need for automation within the cybersecurity industry.  In this episode, James and Andrew go into detail on how important log data is when contextualized and utilized properly to effectively mitigate cyberthreats. It's not enough to check a box on a compliance report, there needs to be context around the log data, as well as the right balance between people, process, and technology to tell the whole story of what is happening within your environment. They also discuss the future of the cybersecurity industry and how vendors can better serve the public sector, including the need for integrations, automation, and cost-effective solutions for the public sector. 

This episode is part one of two that features James Yeager, Vice President of Public Sector and Healthcare at CrowdStrike and Andrew Harris, Sr. Director, Public Technology Strategy at CrowdStrike sharing insights on the cyberthreat landscape, the recent Cybersecurity Executive Order, policy and technology changes within the public sector, and the value of cost-effective log management at scale for threat prevention and detection. James and Andrew discuss the differences between public sector and private sector organizations when it comes to processes, pain points, and budgets. They stress the need for innovation and change within the industry to ensure all organizations have access to the data needed to protect themselves against adversaries.

This is the second episode of our diversity and inclusion series, which is aimed at sharing experiences and ideas from people within the tech community to help them advocate for change within the industry. The goal of this series is to help our audience expand their perspectives by hearing stories from people from all walks of life. By sharing this content we hope to pave a path towards better allyship and increased understanding among diverse groups of people. In this episode we speak with Eric Magee, Regional Sales Manager, SLED Mid-Atlantic, and Aspen Lindblom, Threat Analyst III - R&D, members of CrowdStrike's Team BELIEVE (Black Employees Leading in Inclusion Excellence, Vision and Education), an Employee Resource Group (ERG) for Black and Brown employees and their allies, that aspires to expand, empower, and elevate Black professionals at CrowdStrike and in the community. Eric and Aspen share about their experience working in the tech/security industry, working at CrowdStrike, thoughts on overcoming obstacles or adversity, and advocating for change. 

In this episode, we talk with industry veteran and CrowdStrike CTO, Michael Sentonas about the decision to acquire Humio, challenges around traditional log management solutions at scale, the importance of complete observability with threat detection and analysis, and the complexity of the increasing threat landscape.  Michael speaks candidly about challenges faced by the public sector, as well as private enterprises, and what CrowdStrike is doing to help organizations address those strains to keep their systems and data safe from adversaries.  

In this episode of The Hoot, we talk with David Graff, Network Security Engineer at Michigan State University about pain points experienced with their existing solution, why they switched to Humio, and the need to log everything at scale. David shares MSUs strategy on how to set up needed hardware for maximum efficiency to optimize costs, as well as address the silicon chip shortage many IT departments are dealing with today. Similar to other universities and public sector agencies, David shares MSU's challenges around needing to scale while also being very cost conscious. They use Humio for threat detection and being able to log everything is critical to keeping their network and systems secure. 

Content warning - This podcast covers some serious topics including instances of homophobia, transphobia, and suicide in an effort to help educate.  This episode of the Hoot is part of a diversity and inclusion series we've launched to help bring awareness to issues, experiences, and ideas to help advocate for change within the tech community. The goal of this series is to to help industries launch or expand communities for existing employees, as well as embrace and recruit a diverse workforce to help bring new opportunities and growth.  Our conversation with Ari Ray (they/them), Technology Alliances Manager, and Arielle Cronig (she/her), Senior Intelligence Analyst at Crowdstrike focuses on the LGBTQ+ community and how to create a positive and thriving community for co-workers.  They share their experiences at CrowdStrike, the programs they have helped to develop, how people can be allies to colleagues, and how other companies can proactively embrace inclusion within their own organization. 

Today's service-oriented business environment requires companies to put technology and innovation first in order to stay ahead of the competition.  In this episode, Steven Gall, VP of Engineering at M1 Finance discusses rapid growth, the importance of being able to quickly adapt, embrace new technology, as well as creating and maintaining a customer first culture. 

Simon Phillips discusses the importance of data, including data at the edge for effective incident prevention and investigation. Security is driven by data, it's the heart of your IT systems. The more data you have access to, the more insights your SOC analysts have to help them quickly determine where to start their investigations.  As an industry veteran, Simon recalls the pain points around using index-based databases and having to predetermine what data you might or might not need due to storage and search constraints. Being able to search and correlate data across different departments and sources is critical for security operations. 

An interview with Marian Bolous, a ITDevSecOps expert discusses her career journey and her learnings from the Advanced Log Management Course after attending sessions one through three.   She also discusses how the industry has changed over the last few years, and her views on how log management has evolved. 

This week we are joined by Corelight's Senior Product Marketing Manager Ed Smith and Sales Engineer Gary Fisk. Ed and Gary introduce Corelight@Home, a program that brings Corelight's enterprise-class network detection and response to home networks.  The Corelight@Home program provides an opportunity to become familiar with Humio and the Corelight Sensors, and while you're at it, understand what devices are communicating over your home network. And it's easy to get started! The Corelight team built a configuration script and documentation for easy deployment on Raspberry Pi.  Listen to the podcast to learn: How Corelight@Home came about How monitoring a home network compares to monitoring a traditional enterprise network How Corelight@Home works The different use cases and interesting findings that result from running Corelight@Home Show notes:  Get more of the origin story and the technical details behind Corelight@Home in the blog post Who's your fridge talking to at night?  Check out a recent Corelight@Home webcast.  Register for Corelight@Home.

In this week's podcast, we speak with Bojan Simic, President and Chief Analyst at Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ). DEJ recently surveyed more than 3,500 organizations and identified key areas that are having the strongest impact on IT performance markets in 2020. We sat down with Bojan to get his take on the survey results, including the challenges driving IT performance and the results that took him by surprise.  Listen to the podcast to learn: The benefits of evaluating vendors based on their effectiveness in helping the organization achieve specific goals versus the completeness of their solutions Evaluation criteria for ensuring that solutions are a good fit for your organization's overall tech stack Why observability is key for overcoming a variety of IT challenges Show notes:  Read the DEJ Report: Eight key areas shaping IT performance markets. Learn why DEJ named Humio a leader in eight key areas shaping IT performance.

In this week's podcast we talk with Jerald Perry, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Humio about how Humio's index-free architecture and compression translate to cost savings for our customers. Listen to our conversation with Jerald to learn: Why purpose-built solutions save money How index-free technology reduces CPU and storage costs What factors influence total cost of ownership (TCO) for log management Why scalable log management is essential  We often hear companies lament the fact that the cost of their traditional index-based log management solutions prevents them from collecting all the logs they need. In the conversation, Jerald reveals the benefits of using an index-free log management tool instead. By reducing CPU demands and storage demands, an index-free architecture translates to a reduced TCO. For Humio, index-free isn't the only source of cost reductions. Jerald reveals that Humio's purpose-built design enables it to incorporate more adjustments, such as compression that can facilitate faster performance and less expensive storage and processes of data.  The fact that we're a purpose-built platform for log management means that we have built compression into our strategy. Jerald closes with a warning about the need to choose log management solutions that scale for the future because data volumes are only going to increase.  Companies need a log management partner that has the ability to cost effectively scale with them and still provide access to this log data in an efficient manner. Because three years from now, five years from now, they don't know what that log data is going to look like or how large it's going to be. By leveraging an index-free architecture, advanced compression, and flexible storage options, Humio delivers speed and scalability at a fraction of the price of other log management that scales to meet future data volume demands. Enterprise users can save up to 80% on their infrastructure compared to ELK and Splunk. See how Humio's architecture can keep costs low for years by using our cost savings estimator.

In this week's podcast we have a conversation with Kasper Nissen, Site Reliability Engineer at Lunar, about his experience with the new Humio Operator for Kubernetes.  Lunar is a Nordic bank with more than 200,000 users in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Lunar seeks to change banking for the better so that its users can control their spending, save smarter and make their money grow. Born in the cloud, Lunar uses technology to react swiftly to user needs and expectations. Previously on The Hoot, Kasper introduced us to Lunar's cloud-native environment, and what it took to make the environment at this innovative fintech startup reliable and secure. The platform is built entirely as a cloud-native app hosted in AWS. Lunar uses Humio to achieve observability into what is happening in all parts of the environment, so they log everything they can from the cloud.  Currently, Kasper is in the process of centralizing log management on a cluster in Lunar's Kubernetes environment. He's using the new Humio Operator to simplify the process of creating and running Humio in Kubernetes.  “Running Humio with the Operator is so much easier because it minimizes the operational overhead of running Humio in Kubernetes. The Operator also provides us with a distributed set up out of the box, which is awesome, especially now that we can push the burden of managing Kafka and Zookeeper, which are notoriously difficult systems to run, to the cloud provider.”  Kasper Nissen, SRE at Lunar Listen to our conversation with Kasper to learn:  How Humio addresses the challenge of volumes being tied to Availability Zones in AWS How the Humio Operator simplifies the deployment and management of Humio in Kubernetes How Lunar uses Humio and Git as a single source of truth for all of its environments How Humio helps Lunar optimize their cloud storage Show notes:  Listen to episode 32, when Kasper introduced us to Lunar's cloud-native environment. Read about Lunar's log management journey, which took them from an Elasticsearch and Kibana setup to Humio.  Learn more about the Humio Operator for running Humio on Kubernetes.  Watch an on-demand webinar to learn more about the Humio Operator from one of the engineers who helped build it!

In this week's podcast, we have a conversation with Karsten Thygesen, CTO, and Anders Saxtoft, Sales Manager for Security and Analytics at Netic. They perform best-of-breed business-critical IT operations management for private companies and public institutions, helping clients with operations, security, cloud, data analytics, and more.  Netic uses Humio to help organizations get the most out of their log data. Their experience with processing, analysis, and monitoring of logs goes back more than 15 years. They have assisted a number of Denmark's largest businesses and government agencies with multiple use cases for log management. They offer Log-Management-as-a-Service, with the option of professional services to further customize log management to suit the needs of any organization. John and Karsten talk about some of the challenges that organizations face securing their data. Many companies are struggling to formalize their security strategy, and don't understand the important role of collecting and monitoring the right level of data. “From a security perspective, what we're seeing right now is a lack of maturity. That might sound a bit rash, even though it's true. Many companies have not yet figured out how important security is today and how hard it may actually hit them. It turns out again and again that they are lacking error logs. They do not have common log collection, or even a budget for cybersecurity.” Karsten Thygesen, CTO at Netic They discuss the approach they take to get started with coming up with an overall strategic plan. Karsten highlight the maturity journey that organizations should be on, and the steps along the way: Common log collection is the very first step to better security. Secure the log data, so there's some data available to explore when something goes wrong.  Next, conduct a general analysis of the company to find where the weak spots are that they want to protect. Then take a look at the architecture, the structure, the way they work, the extent of their network, and determine if they have any holes in the architecture. Next, monitor security and security behavior, both from the employees, but also from external threats to the company.  Then review regulations like GDPR and develop a plan for compliance. Down the road, they may implement a SIEM system, or deploy managed detection and response.  Karsten was around for the birth of Humio. He is friends with the founders, and he was part of the discussion about how to design an advanced log management solution and make it affordable. He describes the features of Humio that they rely on for their customers. “Humio is very, very strong in ingesting a huge amount of data and doing very fast, real-time searches. It's easy to visualize the data. And a quite important thing for us is the multi-tenancy, where we can have a shared platform for multiple of our customers and thereby bringing down the cost of operations.” Netic offers Logging as a Service for its customers. This allows their clients to be focused on their own business, feeling secure that the network is being taken care of, and that their security is being monitored.  “Logging as a service means that we are taking the operational responsibility and the infrastructure responsibility and offering Humio as a service to our customers. We make it very easy for them to get onboarded. And we can very quickly start the dialogue about bringing out the value of the data that we onboard in their solution. The whole conversation is much less about infrastructure and technologies and more about how to bring out the value from the data that we are ingesting.” Netic provides a managed detection and response platform where they provide a 24x7 security center. They generate alerts based on indicators of compromise and intrusion detection software, and they use Humio as a collection service and to trigger alerts. “The investigation is often based on the logs that we are collecting from the customers, so we are using Humio, a SIEM, and customer-specific systems to figure out what is going on. We always get a recommendation to the customers for what action they should take.” They discuss why it's a good idea to augment a SIEM system with Humio. Different solutions have different purposes and different capabilities.  “A SIEM system tries to correlate the latest data to see if something is going on, but in a rather narrow timeframe. Humio is more geared to long-term storage of logs so that we can go back multiple years and try to investigate if something happened a long time before. And normally, application logs might not be a security interest, but the security area is moving all the time, so new kinds of threats are appearing, and then suddenly an application log can be an interesting security environment.” Netic helps customers comply with GDPR rules, and with other compliance requirements. Every industry and location has different regulations, so they help their customers understand the requirements and then map them to actual actions. They can pinpoint what logs to collect, and help install them for the required retention period.  “GDPR isn't taken seriously everywhere. A lot of people—maybe it's not the right word—they look at this ‘ghost' called GDPR, and they are afraid of it. Quite frankly, they don't know what to do with it.” Anders Saxtoft, Sales Manager for Security and Analytics at Netic There's strong business value that comes from a good log management system, especially the ability to be prepared for anything that may happen. It's important to have the right data available when there is a breach or if there's an operational problem, or even if you just want to find some business intel or analytics.  “Especially in security where everything is moving so fast, you never know what you need to know. That same goes for applications where everything is changing so fast. There's simply no time to sit down and filter all the data to save some money. Today, time is more critical, and you need to have a solution where you can just log everything without thinking so much about the cost, that's for sure.” Listen to the whole podcast to answer all of these questions:  How can a large enterprise understand its system when it is divided into different silos and nobody has the general overview? What steps do Netic customers take to prepare for the unknown? What problems were the founders of Humio trying to solve when they developed the Humio technology?  How can log management be used for capacity planning?  How does Netic help find the context of a breach, not just detect the damage it does? How can we secure borders when there really are no borders on the edge of the network?    Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member. 

John visits with Torben Haagh, Section Manager of Cloud Platform & Data Science at Stibo Systems, the master data management company that helps companies create transparency in their business processes. Hear how Torben uses Humio to help keep their new cloud-native content syndication platform stable and secure for customers.  Stibo Systems was founded in 1794 as a printing company for the church and the university, and the subsidiary that Torben is in was founded in 1976 to support the printing of catalogs, phone books, and other data-rich publications. They are an enterprise software company, focusing on data and data management, specifically master data management, specializing in product data, information, customer data information, product life cycle management, and product data syndication. They have big customers from all over the world, including Amazon, to Walmart, to the Home Depot. If you go online and look up a product that you want to buy, there's a good chance that the data flowed through the Stibos System data management system.  Torben is working on two product tracks.  “We have the one product that is a pure cloud-native solution that is based on microservices. It can scale individually, to the needs of the customer. The on-premise solution is auto componentized, but using more traditional ways than microservices, and we are moving that to the cloud also.  We are also working on how to have a proper SaaS experience around our core enterprise platform.” He describes some of the important aspects of the system he's helping build for their customers.  “The cloud-native solution we made for the product data syndication. It has a tenancy system that's very dynamic. That's why we are transitioning the on-prem solution to the cloud gradually, and then doing things a little different than when you built new solutions. … What we see on the sales side is a huge shift from people that want to run it on-prem themselves to people that want it as a software-as-a-service solution.” Stibo Systems customers naturally want 24/7 support, and Humio helps provide it in the cloud-native system for a new syndication platform. They are looking at it for aggregating across the enterprise application as well. They have Humio running in production on only one node, and they have a few nodes in their test environments as well.  “We have a team that works around the clock and sits and monitors everything and answers customer calls, Level One and Two support, and production monitoring. In that regard, it's massively beneficial if there are coherent systems for them to look at across everything. Getting sufficient insight into what is going on is naturally vital for us, and having an ability to look across everything in the same toolset is absolutely vital as well.” Torben looks back at the log management system they had installed prior to trying Humio.  “We were looking at the ELK stack in the beginning and had it installed, but most developers actually turned directly to console rocks instead of using ELK, because it was too cumbersome and too tedious.” They saw a demo of Humio that made them understand the benefits of index-free technology.  “Peter from Humio stopped by demoed it to us, and we never looked back. We just had it installed and it was working for us. We simply just pulled the Docker container, and used that directly in our environment.” Since using Humio, they fully understand the benefits of using index-free technology, which allows them to search for anything in the data without heavy indexes or defining what to store upfront.  “Everyone turns to Humio to figure out what is going on. Its ability to brute force search makes it so that you don't have to enrich the data beforehand. We originally had that problem in our application, because we used Elasticsearch for searching in our application. We know the pain about needing to define what you can be searching for in the future.” “So the ability to just create a field with a regex expression on the fly and to create a chart that looks at specific issues that way creates transparency. It gives a really good understanding of what is going on. In that way, it is fairly easy for us to get an overview of the communication in the microservice system.” Torben comments on how easy it is for his team to use Humio.  “Humio is really essential. Just go in and do a query on error logs right. Do a timespan query, an attend ID. You might see it immediately. So, really, really, really easy, because it's so easy to zoom in on the problem from very few parameters." “You know, we don't do any training in Humio at all. People simply pick it up, themselves.  That's easier.”   Listen to the rest of the podcast to answer these questions:  How do they make sense of a problem when all they get is a heap dump?  How do you solve a murder mystery when the body keeps disappearing?  How can Stibos Systems use Humio to fix customer issues swiftly, before they experience them themselves or have to call in?   How can even a slick hotfix process disturb strategic work and become a big noisy squeaky wheel? Why did a university professor invite Kresten Krab Thorup to show him its unique architecture, and how long did it take him to install it himself in his cloud test environment (hint, it's minutes, not hours)? Why is Torben such a fan of Nikki Watt, CTO at OpenCredo, and why is her YouTube video Evolving Your Infrastructure with Terraform, and her talk about the need for insights in a cloud-native architecture (Journeys to cloud native architecture) worth a look?  How do they approach observability, and how do they use Humio together with Prometheus and Jaeger to “keep their stuff together, to keep from getting into big problems?" Why is serverless technology so impactful, and how is event-driven thinking a huge mental leap, and changing the way software is developed? What is the best way to stay close to what's happening in the cloud-native community, and why is it worth taking time to get involved with groups like the Cloud Native Aarhus Meetup? Subscribe to The Hoot Podcast or download the latest episode. The Hoot can also be found on Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, RSS, or wherever you get your latest podcasts. Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

John visits with Junaid Sheriff, Bloomreach Product Manager for Cloud. Bloomreach helps companies around the world to grow online revenue by creating, personalizing, and scaling premium commerce experiences for customers across every touchpoint. With a global footprint, Bloomreach powers over 20% of all ecommerce experiences across the US & UK, and supports 300+ global enterprises including Neiman Marcus, CapitalOne, Staples, NHS Digital, Bosch, Puma, and Marks & Spencer.  Bloomreach delivers its services with the Bloomreach Experience (brX) platform and other products. They use Humio to monitor the platform and provide feedback to customers deploying the solution.   Junaid describes how Humio helps provide insight into what customers are doing through the log aggregation, and with Humio's powerful search capabilities.  “We employ an approach to data called D.A.D.: Detect, Alert, and Diffuse. We detect occurrences with the specific log statements. We configure Alerts whenever these logs are triggered, and we Diffuse by analyzing the sequence of events based on the recurrence and severity and we fix the problems that customers are facing.” Junaid Sheriff, Bloomreach Product Manager for Cloud They collect other valuable data using Humio to support their customers, like the deployments that have happened, so they can tell them how quickly you are progressing from their testing environment to a production environment, how the data from different clusters is being consumed, and if there are issues such as brute force attacks. Bloomreach uses the multitenancy features of Humio to share log data with customers deploying the Bloomreach solution.  “This is mainly for our customer developers who are building the applications based on other solutions. They need to have access to these logs very quickly. Since we use Humio for all our logging needs, we can separate these application logs and the platform logs. So, our environment is a bit different because we are pulling a lot of logs from different clusters into one place. So, Humio helps us greatly with the segregation of these logs into different views.” Like many Humio customers, Bloomreach is being used by more organizations than just developers.  “Within Bloomreach, we have at least four or five departments that are using it. There are platform developers, application developers, support engineers, operations engineers, and our customer developers.” Before using Humio, they tried several different ways to share the application logs. They tried their own solution along with other log management platforms. They developers didn't like the way the logs were being displayed, and they had to filter one-by-one to get to the specific logs they wanted. It was a big headache for them and they did not like that. They had even published a big manual on how to use it, but still wasn't being used.  During a conference, one of Bloomreach's senior engineers happened to speak to Humio, and he was very interested. In less than three months, they were exporting all the application logs and were getting started with their cloud product. “We got a proof of concept to get started. And then we immediately liked it. Humio is very developer-focused. The ease with which a developer could use logs was one of the primary drivers.” They found that it was very easy to collect logs from their Dockerized Kubernetes implementation. They were already using Logstash and Filebeat, so things progressed quickly. “We were looking for a front-end solution that would be developer-friendly. We are a bit of a geeky company, and we have engineers who allow working on these cutting-edge technologies, and build and maintain the solution for the same. So, it was purely a developer-driven effort that led us to Humio.”   Listen to the podcast to answer these questions: What does a Cloud product manager do, and how do they do it all?  What path is respectable when your parents want you to be a doctor, but you are too playful in college?  Why does Bloomreach share log data internally whenever they launch a campaign? What alerts do they recommend for their customer developers? Why do their support and operations teams love Humio dashboards? How did they answer security questions from customers by showing a simple Humio search? How did customers react when they learned that their app traffic had increased by 1000%? What is the secret to developing a strong relationship with Humio engineers?

This week, we have the opportunity to meet up with Daniel Bryant, Product Architect at Ambassador Labs (Datawire), News Manager at InfoQ, and Chair of QCon London. He is a leader within the London Java Community (LJC), and he writes for well-known technical websites such as InfoQ, O'Reilly, Voxxed, and DZone. He blogs at https://medium.com/@danielbryantuk.   Daniel's technical expertise focuses on DevOps tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. You may have met Daniel at international conferences such as QCon, JavaOne, and Devoxx. Or you may have been lucky enough to contribute with him on open-source projects. At Ambassador Labs, Daniel is focused on making the onboarding experience to Kubernetes and cloud native tech—and Kubernetes in particular—as easy as possible, so they're doing a lot of work at the edge. Ambassador Labs is the company behind Ambassador, the popular Kubernetes-Native API Gateway. It is available in both open source and commercial editions. Ambassador Labs builds other open source development tools for Kubernetes, including Telepresence and Forge.  John and Daniel talk about the open-source movement, and building commercial products on top of these things. Because Ambassador Labs products are pretty much open core, they rely on a fantastic community that has contributed in major ways.  “I'm continually impressed by what people do to contribute in the open source community. Rallying around the project you're interested in, finding kindred spirits—I think that's so key to the journey.” Daniel BryantProduct Architect at Ambassador Labs Daniel is the News Manager at InfoQ, and has been a writer for them since 2014. They talk about the path Daniel took to become a writer for InfoQ, and his interest in DevOps and microservices. He credits much of his success to finding mentors and building relationships with them. “One thing one of my mentors always said to me was to pay it forward. Once you get in a position to mentor other people, sponsor them to follow in your footsteps.” As chair for QCon London, he helps with the planning and delivery of the developer-focused event. He claims to be only a very small part of the QCon machine, and that everyone has worked really hard to make sure that sort of the QCon values are evidenced in everything they do. “There's a certain magic that comes from a practitioner-focused event. It's peers, it's knowledge sharing, but it's with a very pragmatic focus. That's something that I think is very unique to the QCon community.” He shares his view on developing a Cloud Native mindset, and how it empowers developers.  “Take ideas or have ideas, and then code, test, deploy, release, verify, and observe, which is super, super important. I look at the Humio folks a lot on this kind of stuff.” They talk about the value of observability, especially within Cloud Native environments. “It's really important to be able to complete that feedback loop—and that's all about observability. You're deploying stuff ridiculously fast, but you don't know whether it's making a customer impact. You don't know whether you're making the world a better place, or delivering value, or whatever. It's really important to get that observability piece to close the loop. And that for me is pretty much what the cloud native full lifecycle movement is about.” Daniel discusses the importance of moving from simply collecting logs to understanding the semantic meaning of what's happening in those logs. “It's no good being able to log a hundred different services if you can't join the dots with a user's request. You need a product like Humio where you can ingest the sheer volume of stuff potentially coming out of all these online services. And then not only can you ingest it, but can you search it? Can you understand it? Can you pull out the semantics? Can you correlate the behavior?” Staying informed about the latest developments is critical to anyone involved with cloud native technology. It's important to remain “book smart,” and to keep tech skills sharp. One of the best ways to develop skills is to download and use trial versions of products.  “You can easily trial stuff. It's really key to download something and get playing with it, and figure out if it's useful or not. I'm super happy with the ability to just pull something down and give it a trial without having to go through an onerous sales cycle. As a developer, that is super empowering. Does it work for me? Yes/No. Is the documentation good? Yes/No. Make a decision right there.” Listen to the whole podcast to answer the following: How can you find ways to help in the open-source community? What may (or may not) be happening with QCon? How can a high school teacher help the trajectory of a student's career? How can Cloud Native be defined? Where should you put your best developers: Developer productivity, the platform, or the core product? What are the four key steps to consistently delivering value?  When is it worth paying for expertise to deploy open-source solutions?  How can developers minimize friction, to deploy, release, and observe on their own? Daniel invites you to get hold of him at @Daniel BryanUK on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn. Find out more about Ambassador Labs at getambassador.io, where you'll find podcasts and articles from Daniel and the Ambassador Labs team. You can also contact the team on Slack. Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

Hear technology professionals from IBM, Deutsche Bank, and Stash discuss achieving observability, managing microservices across distributed environments, optimizing incident prevention and response tactics, and enhancing the customer experiences. Topics included in the discussion: Benefits of streaming observability across complex, distributed systems and applications at scale. Resource planning to make the most of your budget for ITOps and security. How to maintain observability in the move towards Cloud Native. Best practices for implementation and maintenance of security and risk management. Resources and tools to speed up financial services application delivery.

John meets up with Kasper Nissen, Cloud Architect and Site Reliability Engineer at Lunar, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, and co-founder and Community Lead at Cloud Native Nordics. Lunar is a 100% digital mobile-based banking app available in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. As a new banking app, they're not bound by old systems and ancient perceptions of what makes up personal finances. They believe that you know how to handle your money the best way yourself, especially if you have the right tools. So it's their job to create tools that make managing finances easy, intuitive, and fun.  Kasper introduces the Cloud Native environment they built at Lunar, and what it took to make the environment at this innovative fintech startup reliable and secure. For example, they recently moved from being a financial app to becoming a bank, and with it came a lot of regulation.  "The Danish Financial Services Authority requires a lot of requirements when becoming a bank. So that's changed a lot in how we do things — a lot of processes and compliance that we need to be able to handle. That's one of the places where Humio shines for us. We use Humio a lot for audit logging, which is one of the requirements for a bank.  We need to understand and get insight into what our systems are doing all the time." Kasper NissenCloud Strategist and Site Reliability Engineer at Lunar Their platform is built entirely as a Cloud Native app hosted in AWS. They use Humio to observability into what is happening in all parts of the environment, so they log everything they can from AWS. "Whenever somebody interacts with AWS, for example, we get their intentions from CloudTrail and we output that into Humio. We get all the audit logs from Kubernetes into Humio. When people access stuff in the database, all of that is audit logged and shipped to Humio as well. So basically all the systems that a developer can interact with is shipped directly to Humio. That's something that's really valuable to us --  understanding what people are doing with our systems." Kasper offers some insight into the environment he inherited when he started at Lunar. They have been on AWS since they started, but when he joined, they were still just getting started building microservices. He found that monitoring and logging weren't providing observability, and the platform wasn't delivering the benefits of running microservices. So he basically ripped everything apart and build out a new platform using Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies as the foundation for everything.  He had previously used Kubana and a traditional log stack with Elasticsearch and Logstash, because that's what he knew. He tried to build that inside of Lunar as well, but we weren't experts, so they had a lot of issues running that environment. Because of the complexity, the team wasn't using log management, and that was a big problem. "We needed to find something else that was more developer-friendly and also a lot easier to manage for us as platform engineers and cyber-reliability engineers. So that's where we came across Humio at that time. So I think the big selling point was the query language of Humio, and the realtime interaction that you get when using it." He shares the experience that illustrates the power of doing log management the right way. “One cool thing I noticed a couple of months after we adopted Humio was that all of our mobile developers were also using it, sitting with the app and watching all the logs coming in from the phone, and how they interact with the backend services. That was a really cool thing to actually see that the vision or the thing that we saw, and the query language of Humio and developer-friendliness, all of that working and people were starting to use it.” Lunar is known for being very customer-centric. It's one of the things that has helped them succeed in a competitive landscape. Log management is foundational to maintaining an exceptional customer experience.  “Whenever something goes wrong, we have an alert triggered, and we can see that a person using the app is having an issue, or if a transfer went wrong, or whatever it might be. Our developers use that to get the customer ID and send that directly to our Customer Support team that will reach out to the customer and say, ‘Hey, I think maybe you encountered some error. Can I help you with something?' We try to be very upfront with the errors instead of having the customers come to us.” Listen to the podcast to learn: The optimal amount of training an entire tech team needs to get started using Humio. How Lunar achieves observability by monitoring logs, metrics, and traces.  How the team saves time changing fields on the fly instead of having to do that by parsing. Why Lunar employees gathered around a Humio dashboard the day they launched Apple Pay. Why index-free logging makes it very easy to start one place, and dig deeper and deeper and deeper to find something, and then explore that even more. What two ways someone who wants to learn about Cloud Native technology can pursue (one might take five years, and the other might take a weekend or two).   How setting up test loglines in Humio can see if things will save time for the person writing RegExes.  How to think about setting up repositories and views to save time and make things easier. If a Raspberry Pi be used to teach university students about Kubernetes. Why you should consider joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Steven Gall is VP of Engineering at M1 Finance, a Chicago area fintech startup that developed a next-generation, intelligent financial solution that lets users do exactly what they want with their personal finances. Steven leads the backend engineering at M1 Finance. He manages the services that handle M1 Finance trading, account signups, and the banking platform and brokers platform, and all the internal infrastructure and internal tooling that powers the platform. John asks Steven about his background, and his early attraction to finance. Steven shares advice for those getting started in fintech: “There's a lot you can do from the technology aspect. Go find an open-source library, go investigate it, become an expert. Go try to make a pull request. Go try to commit code for the greater good. As a technology leader, I value that when I look for potential hires, because I'm not hiring you for what you know now, I'm hiring for what you can evolve into.” They discuss how Humio is used at M1 Finance to understand what customers are experiencing by tracking the state at many points along the way.  “We use Humio to look at specifically a customer's journey on our platform. They have a request history from our product APIs all the way down to our back-end services. We have a way to say definitively ‘your state was this' at any given point in time — so we can time travel. We have an auditable view of what a customer's state looked like at any given point in time.” With Humio, they can hand off that data to the developers to address any issue for a customer.  Humio provides additional context to the engineering and product teams to handle those edge cases, along with specific customer scenarios. They can hand that off to the engineering team and say, "Hey, look, here are all the requests that resulted in this customer having this less-than-ideal experience on our platform." And we go ahead and address those concerns. Humio is used at M1 Finance across the business. They aggregate a lot of information across different organizations and different use cases, and then use the data to answer questions about the customer experience.  “Humio is used across our organization. It starts with engineering and product, and follows up with QA and our operations team — a holistic view. Our operations team can hand off customer scenarios and really investigate what has happened for a customer journey. The Product team can confirm that. Our engineering team can continue to maintain stability and make sure that there are not regressions within our codebase. And then there's also the fraud aspect, so QA and operations teams are using this as a tool to suss out nefarious actors.” Humio helps M1 to identify the areas to pay attention to, and gives them a place to start. Steven describes an interview with Reed Hoffman from Masters of Scale, where he offers the advice to “let fires burn.”  “Every startup has their own fires, there are constantly things that are awry. Being able to quickly assess which fires you need to put out, which ones are significant in impact is important. It's helpful for taking a step back, and identify the frequency at which these are happening, and identify which fires put out. Humio allows us to visualize that, and make that decision quite quickly.” Steven describes the transition to Humio from a popular open-source platform that was originally in place.  “So initially we were using an open-source stack that we are managing,so there was a couple of pain points there that we were looking to address. Primarily the latency requirements. So most times, when we queried for things, the ingestion rates were in excess of 15 minutes. So if there was a fire in production right now, you have to go tail the underlying box and try to grep force a log. Now at our scale with, you know, servicing 350,000 accounts, that's just untenable, right?  “In order to get to the ingestion rates that we would like, it was going to cost us a ton of money, both from an underlying infrastructure perspective, but also from a resource perspective, There are people that are necessary to keep the stack happy and log ingestion humming.” The team used the 30-day trial, and found that they were able to get it up and running quickly, installed alongside the open-source system.  “Because we were primarily logging out of Kubernetes, and we were using Filebeats at the time, we were able to just hook in a production implementation of Humio, alongside her existing stack. So we had both of them running and production side by side.  “And our developers almost immediately just started shifting to only using Humio. And this is on a trial license. It had become a way of them doing their work. It became a process for them. It became a tool that we couldn't strip away from.  “I would say if any other technology leaders are out there looking and assessing the space, I'd encourage you try Humio. It's pretty low level of effort to just drop it in production and see how it functions. You can really see the value in a side by side comparison.” After using Humio, they've found that the performance just keeps increasing.  “We have about a 15.1x, compression rate. It's amazing that our compression rate has increased along with our ingestion rate. Last year, our compression rate was more or less right around 10x, which is still fantastic, but the fact that we've increased our ingestion and we're still seeing significant gains and compression rates, it's pretty astounding.” Listen to the podcast to hear more about how M1 Finance uses Humio, and pick up tips on how it can transform your organization as well. 

We recently held a Higher Education Roundtable. Listen to the audio in this special edition podcast to hear the discussion. Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt hosted the roundtable to get a closer look at log management's role in higher education. Hear from three university IT professionals who use Humio: Nick Turley from Brigham Young University Jeff Collyer from the University of Virginia Dirk Norman from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Geeta and the panel discuss how Humio contributes to cost savings in their institutions and how data centralization affects their administrative culture. To find out how they use Humio, they discuss details of their unique implementations. Universities choose Humio for the combination of performance and price. Jeff found his way to log management because it was the lowest cost solution to search network monitored traffic from his endpoint sensors. Dirk started using Humio as the best means to deal with the cost of rapidly growing infrastructure. Nick started using log management as a security tool before growing into a place to aggregate all log data from across all BYU locations. "We started with Humio in our security operations center, and it proved its value over and over." Nick TurleySecurity Architect at Brigham Young University All three practitioners find log management helps them make sense of their complex systems. Dirk extolls the benefits of having a centralized logging solution provide a single pane of glass for a hybrid environment of load balancers and web apps that power the research community he supports. Jeff shares how Humio adds value by speeding up incident response. "The biggest thing for our incident responders is to get visibility on the problem as fast as possible, and to get all of that data. And, as people have been talking about, having a single point to go to to get all of that data is where that really shines." Jeff CollyerInformation Security Engineer at the University of Virginia Once data has been centralized, organizations have an opportunity to start putting it to work to discover additional security and performance information that has far-reaching implications for their success. The participants share how log management changed some of the ways their team works, accelerating development by connecting data to teams that otherwise wouldn't have had it. "For us, it's really lowered barriers. Inside Humio, we've been able to build dashboards for the different roles within the IT group so that they can see real-time visibility into custom applications. It's just completely helped with the speed of change in our infrastructure." Dirk NormanDirector of IT at the University of Wisconsin-Madison At BYU, adopting log management led to a revolution in how administrators approach their data as a resource. Borrowing the threat-hunting type of behavior from security analytics, members of network engineering are also beginning to proactively ask pointed questions of their data and go on sustained searches. Humio's instant-speed search results fuel this curiosity, leading people doing investigations to dig deeper and learn more insights about their networks, which they can then in turn use to improve their systems and mitigate performance drop-offs before they occur. “It's really been bridging the gap trying to bring together our cloud and our on-premise, more legacy infrastructure.”  Nick TurleySecurity Architect at Brigham Young University Learn more about how Humio helped three universities cut costs and make sense of their changing environments by watching the full Higher Education Roundtable discussion.   Learn more about log management in universities by reading our case studies: Humio at Michigan State University and Humio at Kutztown University. Take a deep dive into the value offered by log management and the implementation details by reading our How-to Guide: Make networks and data more resilient and secure in higher education. Explore additional use cases for higher education by reading our blog posts: Top 6 Log Management Use Cases for Higher Education and 5 ways modern log management helps reduce higher education budgets. See why our roundtable participants chose Humio to lower the costs of their log management – see how much you'll save using Humio by visiting our pricing page.

To set the stage for our upcoming Financial Services Roundtable on July 16, John visits with Sean Almeida from IBM.  Sean works with global companies in financial services to make their systems resilient and secure. As the Global Red Hat IBM Synergy Sales Leader, Sean leads a global team of CloudPaks sales leaders to bring the best of IBM, Red Hat, and IBM ecosystem partners like Huimo together to unlock the value of the hybrid cloud.  John and Sean discuss how Humio and IBM are working together to provide observability to companies of all sizes who are monitoring their self-hosted infrastructure, and those who have already made the move to hybrid, cloud native, and multicloud environments.  "A lot of banks have more software developers than bankers. I think we are ready for the next leap in technology as we look at how machines and humans work together better." Sean shares his thoughts about the financial services industry, and how Humio and IBM are addressing digital transformation. Banks are moving from being located in a building to becoming an online service available from anywhere. They've had to focus on creating a branchless experience for customers.  "Today I deal with so many customers that don't even have a real estate presence. Everything they do is online -- their whole experience, the way they interact with customers. Everything is paperless, everything is branchless." Of course, current world events have caused businesses to accelerate plans to reach more customers remotely through digital technologies. For financial services, the move to touchless has become important. And of course any business today is looking for ways to be more efficient. When talking about staying competitive, Sean brings up a surprising point about who banks see as their competition:  “I ask banks who they see as their true competition, and most of the time it's not a bank that they are worried about — it is a tech company. That's where the disruption is happening.” Sean explains that financial services are making the move to the cloud to remain competitive. Barriers to being successful in the industry are falling away, because of the flexibility and availability of services to create a great customer experience. This requires new tools and new strategies, and together, IBM and Humio can provide those for customers.  "The partnership with Humio is strategic because clients are moving from monitoring and APM and traditional tooling to observability. That platform shift requires a lot of new tooling, new platforms, new thinking." "When you move from a monolithic to a microservice architecture, there is a huge explosion in the amount of microservices and containers — from a factor of one to a factor of a hundred. Here's where I'm very excited about what IBM and Humio offer." Humio is able to provide a level of observability that traditional platforms struggle with. Being able to see what's happening across self-hosted or SaaS platforms in one pane of glass is a strong differentiator. By making processes visible and making it easy to discover the root cause of issues, Humio reduces the mean time to resolution (MTTR) which can result in significant cost savings to the business. "A typical resolution time I'm seeing for clients who use traditional monitoring tools is anywhere from a few hours to sometimes even a day or two. In today's marketplace, you cannot afford to have your service down, because depending on the industry, that could cost you millions to even billions." Of course, there are barriers to implementing new technology. That's why it's important to have a solution that is the least disruptive, and will plug into the enterprise and add immediate value.  "Nobody has money sitting around to afford the other platforms out there. That's where Humio comes in — because of the smartness within the technology, it's able to provide that experience at a fraction of the cost." "Gone are the times when clients have six months or a year to unlock value. That's where solutions like Humio are plug-and-play, and plug-and-see-the-return immediately." As financial services prepare for the future, they need to stay ahead with the latest technology, and work with a business partner that has the expertise and experience to create an architecture that will meet future business use cases.  "When making platform decisions, look at who has use cases that can crop up in two or three years. Because a lot of times it's solving the unknown. Solving for the known as easy. Solving for the unknown is the most complex part of an architect's job."  As the conversation wraps up, Sean shares his advice about trying new things, even when a lot of times, new things can fail. "It's not about not failing. Failure is good — but failing fast, learning from it, and then pivoting from it is what we're all about today." Listen to the podcast to come away with a better understanding of the factors that influence the financial services industry today, and how Humio and IBM are working together to make these complex environments observable, so engineers are able to create customer experiences that are changing the face of banking around the world.    Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

In this week's episode, John has a conversation with security engineer Fatema Bannat Wala about the challenges of providing network security in a higher education setting. She has experience working as a security engineer for the University of Delaware and is currently working for Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the Energy Sciences Network. Fatema shares how she was drawn to transition from being a software engineer to being a security engineer because of diverse and novel challenges security provides on a daily basis. She explains the forces driving those challenges – universities have a wide variety of data they'd like to protect, a never-ending rapid rotation of users, inconsistent mobile device IPs, and a wide variety of compliance regulations like HIPAA and PCI. Universities deal with a variety of data. The crown jewels for a university is the data that it is the custodian of, and that data comes from the students. That data may be a student's personal reports. That data may be a student's health records. That data may be payments from credit cards. That data has to be protected.” She shares security best practices and defense strategies for protecting university assets. She recommends practicing network segmentation in order to prevent a compromise in one causing additional problems in another. “Centralizing all the logs in one location greatly simplifies a lot of processes. A centralized solution for all the logs lets us correlate them efficiently in real time. It's a great help because now you don't have to go to 50 different systems.”  Fatema provides tips for security engineers that are just getting started. She points to the value of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization that specialized in sharing technology resources and mentorship for higher education users.  Listen to the full podcast and gain a greater appreciation of the many threats faced by security engineers working in education and a few ideas for dealing with them. Listen to the full podcast and gain a greater appreciation of the many threats faced by security engineers working in higher education and a few ideas for dealing with them. To hear more security use cases for centralized log management in university settings, join us for a Higher Education Roundtable featuring guests from Brigham Young University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

In this week's episode, John has a conversation with industry analyst and entrepreneur Bojan Simic. He is the founder of Cognanta, Inc. and Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ). Digital Enterprise Journal brings together the most advanced concepts from analyst research and media industries. Their publications are driven by ongoing survey research, and their coverage spans across all major business-to-business technologies. DEJ operates as a subsidiary of Cognanta, a research firm dedicated to helping business professionals understand the impact of technology deployments on their key goals. DEJ recently published a Technology Innovation Snapshot where they summarize a recent briefing with Humio. In it they discuss the topic of observability, and they highlight how Humio is uniquely positioned to provide value to organizations: “...DEJ's upcoming study on The Value of Observability show 4 key areas where organizations are showing the most interest in deploying Observability solutions: Making more educated decisions faster;  Facilitating innovation by adding more intelligence to software release cycles;  Providing full visibility across complex environments at scale;  Maximizing the value of Cloud deployments.  Humio's solution addresses each of these four areas in a unique fashion.” Bojan and John discuss how observability provides value to organizations, and how advancements in modern log management provide real-time insights from streaming data. This is helping organizations to learn more from their processes and deliver one of the more important aspects of digital transformation: a better customer experience. “The whole notion of digital transformation means different things to different people. If you look at all definitions they have two things in common. First, how do we use technology as a source of competitive advantage? And second, how do we do that with the customer in mind?” They discuss an upcoming study on Enabling Top Performing Engineering Teams. Bojan explains how the study can be an important tool to explain the business value of engineering, and how enabling engineers to focus on their core skills can help an organization create a competitive advantage and move ahead in times when they may be tempted to cut budgets.  In fact, DEJ found that enabling engineering teams to focus on creating business value is becoming hugely important. Organizations in DEJ's research are reporting a 3.1 times increase in missed revenue due to slow software delivery, since 2016. Additionally, organizations are reporting $2.2 million average estimated revenue loss per month, due to performance-related slowdowns in application release times. “Is technology something which is an enabler, or is it actually the core of a strategy that will create a competitive advantage?”  They discuss a recent DEJ study: “19 Key Areas Shaping IT Performance Markets in 2020”. The combination of customers expecting faster applications and better digital experiences and IT's increased understanding that both 1 and 1,000 user trouble tickets issued are an indicator of failing is driving the need for a proactive and customer-centric approach to managing IT. The study shows a 76% increase in the number of organizations reporting that making IT data actionable as their key goal. The study also shows that the impact of improving the ability to collect more IT monitoring data on performance metrics is fairly weak. Putting monitoring data into actionable context is the key for addressing all major performance challenges,  and should be a starting point for creating successful management strategies. Additionally, 64% of organizations are looking to deploy a real-time platform for processing IT data.    Listen to the conversation, and come away with a deeper appreciation for the power of data and the impact of carefully-conducted customer research   Subscribe to The Hoot Podcast or download the latest episode. The Hoot can also be found on Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, RSS, or wherever you get your latest podcasts. Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

John welcomes guests from The New Stack – Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief, and Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director – to discuss their perspectives on DevOps trends and greater digital landscape on our latest podcast.  We'll explore: The essence of DevOps What the outlook in the next year is How IT functions like a nervous system Why Alex knows so much about thread count Why Libby sees a connection between science writing and DevOps writing The New Stack provides a model for how to run a publication with a high degree of journalistic integrity and unique perspectives. And not just any type of journalism, but useful longitudinal analysis that is useful to decision-makers. "Monitoring has traditionally been about what has happened. Now we're moving into this age of observability. We're looking at what's happening at the moment.”  Alex Williams, Editor-in-Chief, The New Stack  As the conversation turns to what trends are emerging, Alex points to declarative infrastructure being a key influencer to how operations are changing. He states, “It's about reaching that desired state. It's not something you can do from point A to point B. You're really needing to iteratively do that.” He recognizes that Humio supports the iterative DevOps process by providing instant feedback and he references the insights provided by Humio's CEO Geeta Schmidt in our first podcast.  Our guests next address the nature of the current tech landscape and the implications of digital transformation. They recognize the importance of technology and note that the most successful businesses have the most up-to-date technology in place before market conditions start exerting pressure. “The companies that modernized, the companies that are already distributed, they're already in the cloud, they're using Kubernetes – those companies have been able to scale rapidly to meet the demand that customers are placing on them. And the companies really falling behind were not modernized. They're now trying rapidly and desperately to do that.” Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack Libby continues to explore not only the infrastructure side on the pandemic response, but also the customer side of the response. She sees operations teams emerging as a vital component that connects the two, ensuring people get connected with the goods and care they vitally need. “Lately we've been talking about operations as first-responders – the people who are on the front lines of maintaining our networks and making sure that our hospitals are up and running. The people that are maintaining those networks are in effect allowing us to be at home, and to shelter.  Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack The interview concludes with Libby and Alex sharing their outlook on what changes they expect to see in the next 12 months. Libby shares how she sees digital events continuing to take over for physical events, and having a positive influence on attendees. “We've seen really good things come from just a few tech events that were organized by the community – people sharing ideas connecting with partners and adapting together to make changes. If you try to do it in isolation, if you try to come up with the best solution – going back to open source – you can't keep up.” Libby Clark, Editorial and Marketing Director, The New Stack

John visits with Pratik Gupta, CTO, IBM Hybrid Cloud Management & IBM Distinguished Engineer, and Morten Gram, Humio EVP, to talk about this IBM original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement and the value it will bring to customers. The companies will collaborate on solutions that help clients continually ingest streaming data across their infrastructure, and help identify a variety of problems from application service down-time to cyberattacks.  “One of the most interesting aspects of Humio I found was its unique architecture that allowed it to be very high performant and scale to enterprise needs. So that got me more interested in learning about Humio and its capabilities and how to actually work with our enterprise clients, both who are on the cloud and on premises.” Pratik Gupta, CTO, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management Read more about the announcement: Humio accelerates its momentum with extended collaboration with IBM. Before addressing the OEM announcement, Pratik explains his initial interest in Humio, and what led to it becoming part of the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. He describes how Humio contributes to the overall function of the Cloud Pak.  “It's really part of an overall hybrid cloud management control plane which is bringing together all aspects of visibility and governance and automation for our platform. So Humio is a great fit working for Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.”  Pratik and Morten explain the nature of the OEM Agreement, and how it builds on the existing relationship between the two companies to provide opportunities for both as they grow.  “We're announcing an expansion of the partnership with IBM... The two companies are going to get closer and IBM is going to work even more with Humio and expand Humio's usage out to different areas of IBM.”

Daniel Card, founder of Xservus and Pwndefend.com joins John to talk about how he uses Humio in Cyber Volunteers 19 (CV19), an all-volunteer task force he co-founded to protect the cybersecurity of data used by healthcare workers in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak. CV19 is sharing vulnerability information with intelligence agencies who in turn share it with compromised health organizations so they can take steps to protect themselves Follow the LinkedIn group to find out how you can help support the mission of CV19: Cyber Volunteers 19. In the podcast, before we start talking about the cloak-and-dagger work, Daniel starts by telling about how he got his start in tech as a consultant. From there he worked his way up to managing IT infrastructure and automation, and eventually was responsible for 25,000 machines before leaving and starting his own security consulting company, Xservus. As we turn toward a security focus, he warns of the rampant vulnerabilities he sees existing in internet-facing security from mismanagement of technology. He provides a straightforward means of addressing those gaps in security, pointing out that each use case is different and must be addressed stepwise to systematically identify assets, threats to those assets, and ways to add protection. He notes that most common compromises in a system come from simple credentials leak or an unsecured gateway. “So hang on a minute. You run a business that makes that much money and you left the door open?!” Daniel next talks about the start of the CV19 volunteer program and the real dangers he saw where cyber vulnerability intersected with health care. “I was like, ‘this could really kill people!' This could be a cyber incident that has massive amounts of lives against it. Can you imagine ransomwaring 25 hospitals in the UK at once while they're stretched from every other angle?” He explains how the CV19 team is using Humio to create a top-level view of countrywide data sets. From there, they can measure levels of protection and quantify their success. Also it provides a means of focusing on specific logs.  “We took Humio and made it into a decision-making tool. That means we can look and slice and dice to the point at which we have something that gives us a broad view that we can zoom into.” Daniel explains CV19's work as a passive monitoring operation that passes data along rather than engaging with threats actively. Along the way, he attempts to clear up some misconceptions of cybersecurity. For users looking to protect themselves, he points to a handful of ways users can harden their systems and prevent the most opportunistic types of attacks. “There are 20 massive key things you can look at and harden pretty easily. Even then, you're not completely covered; this is about getting rid of massive ramps to start an attack vector.” Hear all of Daniel's non-redacted tips for upgrading cybersecurity and learn how Humio transformed empowered CV19's response by listening to the full podcast.

Alan Shimel, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of DevOps.com and John talk tech and how to stay informed about what's new in DevOps.  Alan introduces the MediaOps network he presides over as CEO and Editor-in-Chief. He shares the background of DevOps.com and how he brought together a network of over 400 security-focused technical bloggers for Security Boulevard. His company also provides coverage of tech through its Digital Anarchist video platform, and provides year-round coverage of DevOps through DevOps TV on YouTube and DevOpsChat podcasts. His team has filled the void created by a lack of conference events with TechStrong TV, a DevOps-focused daily show that is produced five times a week with 2-4 hours of content. Tune in! In addition to media coverage, Alan co-founded the Accelerated Strategies Group, a collection of tech experts with hands-on experience that provides reports for free, disrupting the decades-old paradigm found in the analyst business. Alan shares the story of how his career followed the rise of the internet. He went from being a lawyer using WordPerfect to building and hosting websites to co-founding the MediaOps network. Alan shares his ideas on leading a team, his perspectives on staying ahead of the trends, and he provides a candid assessment of how the current environment will likely impact DevOps in the next year.  “I think one of the lessons we're going to learn coming out of this is that organizations that are DevOps-enabled, that are adopting cloud-native, that have undergone digital transformation, are going to have a much easier time during this transition and whatever comes after.” Despite the ongoing uncertainty, Alan notes there is a positive way to frame the future. “This is the time to bare down. This is the time to produce your best work. It's also the time to not be afraid to walk the highwire without the net. It's the time to execute. No matter how bad the macro may be, there's always room for success for people and organizations that work hard.”

Kevin Nejad, CEO and founder of Vijilan joins John to talk about security and how adopting Humio transformed the SOC services his company provides for MSPs.  Kevin begins the conversation by discussing how he started his career as a special investigator for incident response teams. He tells us a bit about how he was doing cyber threat hunting before it was called ‘threat hunting.' Kevin expanded his experience in the security space, assisting with the development of a SEM, effectively working on a SIEM before SIEMs were defined. Kevin provides advice for new entries into the security field, emphasizing the importance of specializing and cultivating a deep understanding of the technology involved.  We discuss the major challenges facing the modern security community – finding talented engineers and dealing with the infrastructure strain of log volumes that triple or even quadruple year-to-year. We address how implementing Humio helped Vijilan respond to these growing volumes of data and eliminate blind spots. Kevin shares how Humio helped Vijilan not only meet the demands of this growing volume, but prepared his company for years of similar growth while immediately opening the doors to new clients he wouldn't have been able to accept using his previous logging solution.  We wrap up our conversation with Kevin explaining why Vijlan chose Humio, noting how it was the only viable option of the logging solutions they tested. Hear more about how Humio transformed how Vijilan works, affecting everyone from their finance team to their clients by listening to the full podcast.

The Hoot - Episode 21 - Adrian Colyer, Accel Venture Partner and Morten Gram, Humio EVP  A technical discussion with the author of The Morning Paper Adrian Colyer, Accel Venture Partner, Humio board observer, and author of The Morning Paper joins Morten Gram, Humio EVP and John to talk tech.  Adrian and Morten begin the conversation by discussing the role Accel has played in fueling Humio's growth, and Adrian has contributed as a board observer and technical advisor.  Adrian talks about his popular online publication, The Morning Paper, where he publishes a summary of up to five different computer science academic papers a week. He discusses a few recent entries, including Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions.  Adrian shares his thoughts on how technology is helping companies deliver faster and compete more effectively by using technology. He talks about analyzing value streams, reducing time to value, and doing things in parallel. He describes how this is being accomplished through things like cloud-native architecture, GitOps state deployment models, software-defined-everything, and machine learning transitioning into the inside of enterprise applications.  Adrian and Morten discuss how Humio helps to understand complex systems with a huge number of moving parts and a dramatically increasing volume of logs, with speed and velocity that is stressing traditional logging systems. They wrap up the conversation with Adrian offering advice to companies like Humio.  Listen to the podcast and come away inspired, informed, and feeling a little smarter. 

Today, Humio announced Series B funding, led by Dell Technologies Capital, and that an industry-first new Unlimited Ingest for the Cloud Plan will be coming later this year.  To talk about both, John is joined by Deepak JeevanKumar, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital and new Humio board member, and Morten Gram, Humio Executive Vice President.  Deepak and Morton discuss the recent funding, and how the investment will enable us to provide more innovation, more products, and more value for our customers.  Deepak describes his role as Venture Partner at Dell Technologies Capital and member of Humio's Board of Directors. We're grateful to have his guidance and support as we continue to scale, mature, and succeed as a company. “We started hearing about Humio in the customer network. What caught our attention was that Humio took a very clean-slate architecture in how to store and analyze logs. Existing log analytics companies have a 10-year-old architecture. Given how fast the volume of logs is increasing, we thought that a new architecture is needed. We saw that potential in Humio.” “With the growth of microservices, a lot of IT products need to be developer-friendly, DevOps friendly, and multicloud. We need to create the next-generation log management play that is native to this cloud world, that's native for this microservices world. This is one of the rare markets in IT infrastructure that grows much faster than an already exponentially growing IT infrastructure market.” Deepak JeevanKumar, DTC Morten talks about the new Unlimited Ingest for the Cloud Plan, and how it significantly changes the cost of scaling to massive volumes in a SaaS environment. This new offering will give our customers similar benefits as our Unlimited Self-hosted Plan. The Unlimited Ingest for the Cloud Plan will be available later this year. “Two years ago, we launched the Unlimited Plan for our self-hosted customers. We really want to bring similar benefits to our cloud customers. It will significantly change the cost of scaling to big volumes in the SaaS environment.” Morten Gram, Humio We wrap up by discussing the path that Humio is on, and what customers can expect from Humio as we continue our progress.  Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

This week, John talks with Miguel Adams, a security officer at a US government agency. Miguel shares his thoughts on why they chose Humio, and offers some suggestions for other agency personnel that are charged with keeping their infrastructure secure and resilient.  They use Humio to look for malicious activity, including indicators of compromise, adherence to policies, use of whitelisted ports and protocols, and behavior like lateral movement and elevation of privileges.  On a routine basis, we get indicators of compromise (IOCs), and we're able to do that almost instantaneously with Humio. The return is within a matter of seconds or minutes, whereas before it took us half or day or more.   - Miguel Adams  We discuss how budgets impact planning, and what Miguel is doing to make sure he has up-to-date tools and an experienced staff. Tune in to the podcast to learn more about Miguel's environment, and hear his tips on implementing and running Humio. 

His journey as a student, working at NeXT, earning a Ph.D., and creating Humio In Episode 18, John visits with Kresten Krab Thorup, CTO and co-founder of Humio.  In this special episode, we get to know Kresten better. You'll be inspired by his story, and you'll get to see what makes him so brilliant and so warm and personable. He shares some behind-the-scenes background about his storied career in tech, and he offers his thoughts on founding Humio.  Kresten has been involved in programming computer languages from an early age. He tells the story of how he began programming on a Commodore VIC-20, and how that led him to want to learn how to build languages to do more with the hardware. Kresten got his professional start as a student, working as an IT administrator in the university's computer lab, and helping professors with LaTeX, an early typesetting technology — hidden inside somewhere is a typesetting geek. He soon got hooked on programming languages and hasn't slowed down at all.  “The real beauty of programming languages is that they are tools for expressing and understanding the intentions and what the system is — they are abstractions for describing a program. They are a set of tools for thinking about your program.  Humio is similar, it's a set of tools for understanding and thinking about your run-time of your system.  Kresten shares the story behind Humio, and why it was important to develop a modern log management system that takes advantage of advances in technology.  “Humio has an ability to deal with unknown problems — this is where Humio really shines. You're in the unknown, and you don't have a metric or a monitor where you know exactly what's going on. If you log everything, you have this ocean of logs showing what is going on in your distributed system. That's where something magical happens that you just couldn't do before.” “Another magic thing happens when developers put stuff in their logs, and then later go back to see how the system is doing. It's a super-lightweight and easy way to get insights into what's going on in production.” Kresten shares his view on the technology Humio is focused on for the coming months, and shares some of the projects the engineers are working on. He finishes up by sharing his advice on building a career in technology, and the importance of focusing on what he does best, and leaving the rest to others who are better in areas where he's not particularly strong.

John joins Christian Hvitved, Chief Engineer and founder of Humio, and Anders Jensen, VP of Engineering to discuss recent Humio product features, including bucket storage and the new joins function.  Christian and Anders introduce themselves, and share a bit about their background. They then describe in more detail a few of the features that were recently announced.  Humio now supports bucket storage designed for streaming data from major cloud providers. Christian and Anders explain the process behind prioritizing the feature, and how they worked with customers to make it seamless.  “Lately we've been running into customers that are logging two-digit terabytes per day, and who also may have a requirement to save their logs for a year. With traditional SSDs or spinning disks, that would be really hard and very expensive. But with bucket storage, it's suddenly affordable.” Anders Jensen, Humio VP Engineering  “Users in the system won't see this. The data will just be stored. And if they search back in time that's only available in bucket storage, they will just type in their search, and it will just work.” Christian Hvitved, Humio Chief Engineering Officer and founder  Learn more about bucket storage in the recent blog post: Humio delivers seamless access to live and archived data with bucket storage. We discuss the new join filter, and how it can be used to enrich data from different data sets. We talk a bit about how customers are using the feature, and how it might be enhanced in the future.  Find out more about joins in the last week's blog post: Humio now features joins, query quotas, a new chart engine, and UI updates. 

In this week's podcast, John talks with Kristian Gausel, Security engineer at Humio. Kristian introduces himself and shares why security is such an important focus for Humio.  Kristian describes why organizations are more concerned with security, and what is being done about it. We discuss why having a powerful log management system with robust retention helps prepare for the unknown, and makes it easier to get to the bottom of what happened and reduce the time to recovery. We talk about how GDPR shifts the responsibility for privacy and security from the individual to the company storing personal information, and how logs can help with compliance. We also talk about security considerations for those moving to the cloud, and how to better prepare.