Jim Hagan

In the July primary, the people of Maryland picked candidates from each party to compete for our vote on Nov. 8. The contest between party candidates began the day after the primary, and it continues through the general election, when the final whistle blows, and the score is tallied to determine the victors. Unlike sports contests, political contests have very few rules, and the lack of rules often creates confusion about the competition and the competitors.

Thanks to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more recent privacy laws in various jurisdictions, many of us are familiar with personally identifiable information (PII)—any data that can be used to identify a specific individual, like Social Security numbers, mailing or email addresses, and phone numbers. But the proliferation of SaaS platforms and cloud computing, in general, has expanded the scope of PII considerably.

In typical enterprise accounts, I see log management for application developers, DevOps, and SRE teams prioritized in the following order of interest: Application logs from core web and backend services Access logs from NGINX, Apache, AWS load balancers, and similar services Infrastructure logs from critical platforms, such as SQL databases, Redis clusters, Kafka clusters, and virtualization layers However, there is an additional class of logs that provide essential visibility into some of...