If you’re evaluating Fluent Bit vs Fluentd, you’re usually trying to standardize what runs on Kubernetes nodes, what runs centrally, and what won’t fail when volumes spike. This debate is less about which project is "better" and more about where each one fits in your pipeline — edge collection vs central routing, light processing vs heavier transforms, and day-2 operations. In many environments, the final architecture includes more than just one agent.

A practical approach to converting existing logs into modern observability. OpenTelemetry promises a vendor-neutral standard for observability, consistent telemetry, and the flexibility to change backends without rewriting everything. In practice, however, OpenTelemetry adoption often runs into a familiar obstacle: reality. Here’s a common scenario. You’re eager to improve observability, but your environment includes a mix of legacy applications, network devices, and third-party systems. Many of these were never designed for modern instrumentation, and changing them is risky, expensive, or simply not an option.

Centralized logging is no longer optional. Whether you’re troubleshooting production incidents, investigating suspicious activity, or meeting audit requirements, you need a way to collect logs from many sources, normalize them, search them quickly, and turn them into alerts and dashboards. In practice, that starts with reliable collection — often via solutions like NXLog Platform — so the data arrives clean and consistent. Two of the most common open-source paths people compare are Graylog vs ELK Stack.

How a federal agency’s monitoring gaps turned a containable incident into a three-week nightmare In September 2025, CISA responded to a federal agency breach that security teams could have stopped in hours. Instead, threat actors roamed the network undetected for three weeks. The damage? Multiple compromised servers, web shells planted across the infrastructure, and a persistent foothold that took significant resources to remediate. The root cause wasn’t a zero-day exploit or sophisticated malware.

From years of supporting NXLog Agent deployments across many environments, we’ve learned that while Linux generates a wealth of security logging, much of it remains underutilized. Critical security events are buried across multiple log files and subsystems, making it more complicated than it should be to spot suspicious activity. Efficient Linux security logging requires knowledge of which events matter and where to get them. Authentication attempts, privilege changes, package installations, audit events, and system shutdown events can all tell a story when viewed together.

Some still think telemetry is a futuristic concept, but it isn’t. It’s already integral to the smooth running of everything from websites, e-commerce platforms and mobile apps to manufacturing, traffic control and much, much more. And it all begins with the humble data log. From the earliest days of computing, programmers have recorded useful information — often in a file — to help track and react to potential threats and understand what’s going on "under the hood" of their IT infrastructures.