Nov 11, 2016
Monitoring for potentially malicious activity
In order to protect applications such as Slack from malicious activity, it was crucial to monitor the infrastructure at all times. The best way to do this was through a centralized logging system and Slack enables the same through tools such as StreamStash, Elasticsearch, and ElastAlert.
StreamStash is a Node.js based service for log aggregating, filtering, and redirecting. It transmits outputs to ElasticSearch, which is an open source full-text search engine using an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. It provides an almost real-time and scalable search to the user.
This helps users retrieve any log file at its most updated state almost instantly. ElastAlert helps provide alerts for anomalies, spikes and other curious patterns for data available in ElasticSearch. This robust system together ensured all the data was processed and collected by the application and can be studied and retrieved at a moment's notice for necessary action.