Looking at server logs, or any type of logs for that matter, can be a tedious and painstaking task for any sys admin. Most often we have to remote into each individual server and then if we have to piece together time lines and logs from other servers just to get somewhat of a picture as to what happened and when.

So what do we do? We usually set up a centralized log server like syslog and send all of our logs to it. At least this takes away some of the issues. No more remoting into multiple servers right? Right! But we are still left log with files being located in separate files and looking like a bunch of gobbledy gook.

Getting our data out so that it makes sense can be done with a commercial product but those things can cost some serious coinage! So what do we do about that? Did someone say opensource to the rescue, and more specifically, ELK to the rescue? I think they did and I think that person is Jordan Sissel of Elasticsearch!

In this year end episode of the Blacks In Technology #BITTechTalk podcast we'll be speaking with Logstash (The "L" in ELK ) creator, Jordan Sissel and talking about logging using the ELK (Elasitcsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.

Also joining us as a guest co-host is BIT member Shawn Jackson (a.k.a. gt50).

If you want to know how to make sense of your data, this is the podcast for you!