The Devo In-House Relay

Put simply, the Devo In-House Relay is a software application that listens on its ports to receive inbound events, apply processing rules to the events, then forward them over a secure channel using SSL/TLS encryption to the Devo Cloud. We strongly recommend that you set up and use a Devo Relay, especially when it's not possible to send events directly from the source system to the Devo Cloud securely and with its associated tag. 

In addition to tagging events based on configurable rules and providing a secure channel to the Devo Cloud, the relay also:

• Sends the events signed with SSL certificate authentication.
• Eliminates the need to enable isolated event sources with internet access.
• Offers the ability to compress the data to minimize bandwidth requirements for sending.
• Uses rules to apply filters in order to weed out the events you don't need to save in your Devo Cloud.
• Temporarily stores the events in buffer in case there's an outbound connection error, so that it can resend the events when the connection is restored.

Because the Devo relay is designed to reside within the same network as the event sources it forwards, it does not natively accept inbound traffic with SSL encryption. However, if you need to send SSL encrypted data to the Devo Relay, here's one way of doing it.

Is it necessary to use a Devo Relay?

No, it's not always necessary to use the relay. If an event source has internet connectivity, can correctly tag its events, and send them over a secure channel to the Devo Cloud, you can send them directly. For example, you can monitor system logs files on Unix-like servers, then send them properly tagged and over a secure channel to the Devo Cloud by using the rsyslog or syslog-ng protocols. 

Alternatively, there are 3rd party and open source data collection tools like NXlog and Fluentd that you can also use. Read about all of them here.

Although there are several alternatives for sending data to Devo, you should keep in mind that the In-house Relay provides some additional benefits:

• Optimized cloud storage - You can configure the relay to filter out unnecessary events before forwarding to the Devo Cloud.
• Minimize bandwidth requirements - The relay compresses event data for faster data transmission.
• Avoid data loss - The relay retains events in buffer so that transient connection errors don't result in data loss.

Related articles

• Installing the Devo Relay
• Configuring the in-house relay
• Sending SSL/TLS encrypted events to the Devo relay
• Relay troubleshooting tips