Creating and Testing Ingest Pipelines with Grok for NGINX Logs in Elasticsearch

The Elastic Stack is widely used for log management, monitoring, analytics, and observability. It includes several tools such as Beats, which collect logs from various systems. However, not all data in these logs is necessary for indexing. To filter, transform, and enrich documents before they are indexed, we can use ingest pipelines. In this blog, we will discuss how to create a simple ingest pipeline and test it.

Automate PagerDuty Maintenance Windows with Azure DevOps

Reliable notifications, scheduled escalations, and effective on-call management are essential for operations teams to quickly identify and address issues. PagerDuty is a platform that provides all of these capabilities, enabling teams to maintain high reliability and reduce operational noise.When working with any operations platform, reliability is key to avoiding unnecessary alerts or actions. For example, during a scheduled system update, creating a maintenance window in PagerDuty can prevent false alarms triggered by expected changes.

In this blog, we'll discuss how to create a PagerDuty maintenance window using an Azure DevOps pipeline. By adding this step to your deployment process, you can automatically start a maintenance window during system updates, improving alert accuracy and reducing manual overhead.

Using StringList Parameters in Azure DevOps Pipelines

Azure DevOps YAML pipelines now support the stringList parameter type, which allows you to present multiple selectable options as checkboxes in the pipeline UI.

This blog explains a pipeline that uses a stringList parameter with three values: dev, qa, and prod. After adding the region parameter as a stringList, the pipeline looks similar to the image below.