Join us for the first Elastic Salt Lake City meetup where will will have food, drinks, and discussion about the ELK stack. Community speakers, Russel Havens, Hayden Panike, and Tanner Gary Lund  will give a talk titled "The ELK Stack: Practical for System Administration?", and we will hear from Aaron Mildenstein and Tyler Langlois as well.

Stay tuned for more information on location, agenda, and talks!

Talk: "The ELK Stack: Practical for System Administration?" by Russel Havens, Hayden Panike, and Tanner Gary Lund

Abstract: Modern networks are both complex and important, requiring excellent and vigilant system administration. System administrators employ many tools to aid them in their work, but still security vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, and unanticipated device failures occur regularly. The constant and repetitive work put into fixing these problems wastes money, time, and effort. We have developed a system to greatly reduce this waste. By implementing the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) , we are able to analyze device data and logs as part of general administrative tasks. This allows us to track security risks and identify configuration problems far more quickly and efficiently than conventional systems could by themselves. This approach gives system administrators much more knowledge about and power over their systems, saving them resources and time.

Talk: "What's new in Logstash 1.5" by Aaron Mildenstein, Elastic developer

Abstract: Changes in Logstash 1.5, The what and the why, The Plugin Ecosystem, how to write your own plugin, Q&A (time permitting)

Speaker Bio: Aaron is a former SysAdmin who discovered his passion wringing useful information from log files and performance metrics of all kinds. He discovered Logstash and Elasticsearch in 2011 and has never been the same since. He started developing and extending Logstash at Elastic full-time in October 2013.

Talk: "Scaling Elasticsearch: Designing for Performance and Availability" by Tyler Langlois

Abstract: What's the best way to scale out your elasticsearch deployment when you've reached capacity? In this talk we'll cover topics like shard allocation, clustering, and best practices to increase performance and stability of an Elasticsearch cluster.

Speaker Bio: Tyler Langlois is a systems engineer with previous experience at SaaS companies, government research organizations, and most recently as an Infrastructure Engineer at Elastic. His primary focus is on building systems and infrastructure that are scalable, secure, and stable.