Introducing A Simpler, More Affordable, Way to Collect and Store Logs with Trunc
In my last article I spoke to the challenges large organizations have with innovation, in the same breathe you could argue that there is such a thing as too much innovation!
It’s with that, that I’m happy to announce that Daniel and I are releasing our third-project in two years- Trunc, a NOC.org product. Yes, we both probably suffer from some form of ADHD!
What is TRUNC?
Trunc is a log management platform. Trunc collects logs from various sources and provides a centralized platform to manage, view and analyze those logs. Pretty cool, right?
Now, the big question might be – ok, but why?
Well, it’s a very big problem for us at the moment. We are currently running two brands that are generating a throve of data in the form of logs (CleanBrowsing and NOC). NOC alone is generating over a TB of logs a day, and growing.
Like many, we started by looking for alternatives in the market. But there was a common theme across all the existing solutions:
- They were all focused on large corporations, this translates into too much unnecessary complexity and extremely expensive;
- The pricing required a mathematics degree and even that would result in variable costs each month (and we’re not talking small numbers for our volume of data);
As bootstrapped founders, this just wasn’t going to work. Because we self-fund all our projects we have to be extra mindful of expenses. So the current situation forced us to do what we do, we built what we needed. We loved it so much, we productized it, and have now opened it up to the world.
Trunc is built for all logs and organizations of all sizes, but we’re especially fond of small to medium sized organizations who have a logging need but don’t necessarily have the financial resources to commit 100’s of thousands just for logs. It’s priced fairly and it does its job.
If you need an affordable, simple to use, log management platform that does its job, give it a try (14-day trial available on all plans)
A Little History on TRUNC
When we first came up with Trunc, 2015 / 2106 circa, the idea was to fork OSSEC and Trunc was going to be its name. For obvious reasons we were a bit distracted. The years, however, have provided new perspective on what the real challenge in the market is, so instead of on a new OSSEC version, we felt it was more important to focus on what we have gotten good at – web based solution, a SaaS, for logs. What’s really cool is that in the process of building Trunc we did end building a GUI for any OSSEC implementation.
Some Logging Context
While new in terms of a product, the premise of it – logging – stems back as far as 2002 and OSSEC (Daniel’s Open-Source Project). In other words, we have had a what some might describe as a very unhealthy relationship with logs for a long time. :D
Logging has been at the core of what we have been building and offering to the world for over a decade. So when you look at what we’ve been doing, the real question is why didn’t we do it before!?!?!
At the core of how Sucuri worked was through the use of logs and early variants of the platform were built on adaptations of OSSEC. Logs themselves were critical to understanding how attacks were happening, and what we needed to do to mitigate them. Logging even plays a critical role in how our DNS resolvers at CleanBrowsing work, and again with how NOC (similar to Sucuri) works. Even today, a lot of the research we’re doing stems from log analysis.
So if you find yourself with some time, and been wondering how to better manage the logs across all your servers, be sure to give Trunc some thought. And yes, future posts will talk about having “too much innovation”. HAHA
As always, here if you have any questions.