Welcome to the Cisco Women in Cybersecurity’s blog series, where we highlight the stories of the mentors who have inspired and advocated for the careers of those in our community. This series seeks t… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Welcome to the Cisco Women in Cybersecurity’s blog series, where we highlight the stories of the mentors who have inspired and advocated for the careers of those in our community. This series seeks to show the importance of allyship, connection,  and how different the journeys can be into a career in cybersecurity.

“It’s by mistake.”

That’s what I thought when I first got a call from the recruiter for the Customer Success Manager role at Cisco. Having spent 10 years in software, I didn’t think I had the relevant experience or expertise in cybersecurity. But one conversation with my first hiring manager changed all that.

I recently sat down with that manager, David Salter, and we talked about why he looks for skills “outside of the box”, and the benefits that different backgrounds and experiences bring to the cybersecurity industry.

Gee: Why do you encourage having people from other backgrounds?

David:  The whole [customer success] team was, and is, built on complementary skills. We had strong technical people. We also had strong leaders and program managers. Everyone brought different skillsets to achieve our core aim of truly understanding the customers’ challenges. Because we all had different skillsets, we would work together, and with the customer, to resolve their challenges.

We can teach security and technology. But those core people skills, and customer interaction skills, are at the heart of what we do.

Gee: For a job posting there are minimum qualifications, then preferred qualifications. In countries like India, there is a lot of competition, so ticking all the boxes in the job description is tough. What influenced your hiring decision to hire me?

David: You were 1 out of over 1200 candidates for this position, so yes, the competition was incredibly tough. I remember that you had a lot of the skills we were looking for, but really, it was all about that first conversation we had.  It was a very natural conversation which, when working in Customer Success, is incredibly important. Every conversation we have with the customer is an opportunity to share and listen.

The conversation was powerful. It was an easy decision to shortlist you, based on you as a whole person, rather than the specific checklist listed in the job description.

Gee: You do a lot of mentoring. Why is this important for you?

David: I benefitted a lot early in career from mentors myself. As I moved into leadership, I discovered it’s not about telling people what to do. It’s about creating an open learning environment. If I share what I know, in an open and honest environment, that encourages others to share, and I learn something new every time.

I still believe that I’ve got new things to learn every day. Mentoring helps me with that, as much as (I hope) it helps the people I’m mentoring. Sharing my own mistakes and challenges helps people address their own challenges. It’s also a great way to give back.

Gee: What are your suggestions for people moving into Cybersecurity from a different domain?

David:. Cybersecurity is such a vast industry, there are so many different types of roles you can do. If you are in a connected part of technology, lets say networking, that’s incredibly relevant for security. If you worked in application development and worked in coding, that’s really useful for security, particularly in the vulnerability space.

There is a Cybersecurity aspect is to every part of IT. It’s not just Firewall and Anti-Virus anymore. We are looking at how a device authenticates to the network, how a user interacts with that device and how they access applications. A good grounding in Information Technology would be very relevant. An understanding of Product Marketing and technical writing can also be relevant…there are so many skillsets that can be adapted to cybersecurity. And the industry needs them.

For somebody starting out, my advice would be to get really curious. Think about what aspect of the industry that fascinates you, and start from there. We should never be scared to think outside of the box.

We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!

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  Gee interviews David, a hiring manager, to discuss why he looks for skills “outside of the box”, his mentoring experience, and more.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

With Cisco FSO Platform, metrics can be reported directly from the code. Unlike using any kind of auto-instrumentation feature, this is useful when a service owner knows what needs to be reported. A… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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With Cisco FSO Platform, metrics can be reported directly from the code. Unlike using any kind of auto-instrumentation feature, this is useful when a service owner knows what needs to be reported. A typical use case would be enabling reporting of domain specific metrics – like number of items in the catalogue for e-shops, number of unfinished orders, SQL queries to specific table, etc. Basically, anything which might be interesting to observe for some period of time, or compared among different implementation versions.

Hands-on guidance on how to set this up

Open Telemetry has a recommended way of how the metric reporting should be routed to any software. The service which will be reporting the data is going to send them to the open telemetry collector, which is a quite convenient universal receiver, processor and exported of (not only) open telemetry formatted data. Open Telemetry collector will then be configured to relay all the data to the FSO Platform tenant.

The first thing that you need to secure is a FSO Platform tenant, to which the data will flow. I happen to have one ready, but I need to get the principal and clientId and clientSecret used to export data. After logging in, I opened a “Configuration” tab, then selected “Kubernetes and APM,” named my configuration, and followed the information presented to me:

FSO Platform – Getting Agent Principal

That should be all I need to configure my Open Telemetry collector.

Open Telemetric Collector configuration

Next, I used Docker image otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latest, since that’s the simplest way for me to run the collector. All I need to do is to provide the right configuration, which is done by supplying –config parameter.

After some short research, I decided to use the following configuration:

Click image to access the gist in Github

Then the only thing left to do is to start the collector:

% docker run --rm -t -v $PWD/otel-config.yaml:/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml
-p 4317:4317 otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latest --config=/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml

The collector starts really quickly, I only verified that all the extensions I added are initialised, no errors printed out.

My go-to language is Java, so lets try that first. Open Telemetry provides a quite extensive list of SDK libraries for any modern languages and runtimes. The Java SDK seems to be the most mature one on that list. This doesn’t mean that Java is the only choice. Realistically, there is already support for reporting Open Telemetry data from any actively used language. And if not, there is always an option to report data using different receivers. For example, you can use Prometheus or Zipkin support which your programming or runtime environment already has.

Metric Data Source

Since I don’t have any application ready for this experiment, I chose to do the manual instrumentation (it will most likely be more fun anyway).

After setting up a project and a dependency on the latest SDK version available (1.29.0), I put together the following class package com.cisco.fso:

Click image to access the gist in Github

Let’s go through some important parts of this code snippet.

First one is the Resource declaration. In Open Telemetry, every data point needs to be reported in the context of a resource, including metrics. Here I am declaring my resource as something with the attributes service.name and service.instance.id — which is a de-facto standard, described as part of the Open Telemetry semantic conventions.

If you explore that space more, you’ll find lots of other conventions, defining which resource attributes should be reported for various components, like container, pod, service running deployed on some cloud provider and many more. By using service.name and service.instance.id, we are reporting a service. On FSO Platform this is mapped to the type apm:service_instance.

Another part worth mentioning is the metric initialization. You can see that I named my metric “my.first.metric”, set the type to gauge, declared that it will be reporting long values, and registered a callback, which does return random long values. Not very useful, but should be good enough to get some data in.

After executing the program, you will see new logs reported by the Open Telemetry Collector we started before:

Click image to access the gist in Github

Exploring ingested metrics using FSO Platform

This is a good sign that the data arrived from my Java program to the collector. Also, the collector contains further logs which suggest that it was able to report the data to the platform. So, let’s get back to the browser and check out whether we can see reported data.

FSO Platform – Cloud Native Application Observability – Service Entity view

Apparently my service was registered by the platform, but there are not much data reported. And, any metrics which are displayed by default, are not populated. Why is that happening?

All the metrics which are there are derived from spans and traces which would be reported by any standard APM Service and even any framework which you’d be using. The Open Telemetry SDK has nice auto-discoverable features for Spring, Micronaut, and other tools you might be using. After putting some load to your service, you would see those. But that’s not what we want to do today. We want to see our very important “my.first.metric” data points.

For that, we will need to use Query Builder, a System Application of FSO Platform, which allows you to query stored data directly using Unified Query Language.

FETCH metrics(dynamicmetrics:my.first.metric)
FROM entities(apm:service_instance)[attributes(service.name)='manualService']

This particular query fetches the reported metric for the apm:service_instance, which was mapped from the resource reported using the Java snippet above. It retrieves values of a metric my.first.metric and shows them on the output. The dynamicmetrics string represents a special namespace for metrics, which were ingested but are not defined in any of the solutions which the current tenant is currently subscribed to.

FSO Platform – Query Builder

Obviously, this is only the beginning and most of you wouldn’t be only reporting custom metrics by hand, you’d be instrumenting code of your existing applications, infrastructure, cloud providers and anything you can model.

Ready to try? Get stated with Cisco FSO Platform 

Related resources

Learn more: Visit the Cisco Full Stack Observability resources hub

  With Cisco FSO Platform, metrics can be reported directly from the code. This blog gives you hands-on guidance on how to set this up.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Get ready for a spine-tingling adventure this Halloween season because we have a treat for you: Cisco U. is thrilled to announce our first-ever Live Learning event on October 30, 2023, and it’s going… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Get ready for a spine-tingling adventure this Halloween season because we have a treat for you: Cisco U. is thrilled to announce our first-ever Live Learning event on October 30, 2023, and it’s going to be a howling good time.

Unveiling the Thrills

Before we delve into the two upcoming sessions, brace yourself for an electrifying surprise: Par Merat, Vice President of Cisco Learning & Certifications, will emerge from the shadows to kick off the event. Par will introduce you to the new era of cloud specialist certification releases and set the spooky tone for the evening.

The Main Event – Two Spooky Sessions

Session 1: Coding the Future: Unraveling the Magic of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Universal Automation Tools
In our first chilling session, “Coding the Future: Unraveling the Magic of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Universal Automation Tools,” led by Quinn Snyder, a Technical Advocate at Cisco U., you’ll delve into the mystical world of network code. Explore the secrets of Infrastructure as Code, universal automation tools, and their domain-specific languages (DSLs). Witness spine-tingling demos showcasing the incredible powers of these tools, including the use of Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) to gain practical insights that will send shivers down your spine.

Session 2: Cybersecurity Threats and Effective Network Protection Strategies
In our second heart-pounding session, “Cybersecurity Threats and Effective Network Protection Strategies,” guided by Yuri Kramarz, a Principal Engineer at Cisco Talos, you’ll embark on a quest to uncover the latest cybersecurity threats and discover potent network protection strategies to ward off the dark forces that lurk in the digital shadows. Learn how to elevate your role as your organization’s top security guardian.

A Learning Opportunity

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn directly from Cisco’s Technical Leaders. They’re here to share their knowledge and experience with you.

How to Enroll

Mark your calendar for October 30, 2023, and prepare to be haunted from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific Time, with our two sessions of chilling knowledge. To secure your spot at this eerie event, click here to sign up.  If you have a conflict, sign up anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

Sign up for Learn Live with Cisco U.

Eerily Exciting Events on the Horizon

In addition to the upcoming Multicloud Specialist Certifications, be sure to keep an eye out for our newest ENCC tutorials on Cisco U. The tutorials are designed to make your learning experience even more frightfully delightful.

Although this is our first-ever Live Learning event, rest assured, it won’t be our last. Stay tuned for spine-tingling information about our next event coming up in March. It’s going to be a scream!

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Use #CiscoU and #CiscoCert to join the conversation.

  Get ready for a spine-tingling adventure this Halloween season because we have a treat for you: Cisco U. is thrilled to announce our first-ever Live Learning event on October 30, 2023, and it’s going to be a howling good time. Unveiling the Thrills Before we delve into the two upcoming sessions, brace yourself for an  Read More Cisco Blogs