Detecting, Assessing, and Redacting PII in Logs with Elastic NLP x LA DevOps

The Elastic Los Angeles User Group is partnering with LA DevOps for a joint meetup on Thursday, October 30th.

⚡️ Interested in giving a talk? ⚡️
Are you interested in presenting your Elastic use case? We welcome 5-10 minute lightning talks, 45-minute deep dives, and everything in between. If you're interested, please send us an email at meetups@elastic.co.

📅 Date & Time: Thursday, October 30th from 6:00-9:00pm

📍Location: O'Briens Irish Pub 2226 Wilshire Blvd Santa Monica, CA

📝 Agenda:

• 6:00 - 6:30 Attendees arrive. Networking/Mingle
• 6:30 - 6:45 LA DevOps Welcome, Attendee Introductions
• 6:45 - 7:30 Using NLP and Pattern Matching to Detect, Assess, and Redact PII in Logs - Stephen Brown
• 7:30 - 8:00 DevOps Adaptability: My Strategy To Be The Human in the Loop - Rich Horace
• 8:00 - 9:00 Networking/Mingle

💭 Talk Abstracts:

Title: Using NLP and Pattern Matching to Detect, Assess, and Redact PII in Logs - Stephen Brown - Sr Principal, Customer Enterprise Specialist at Elastic

The prevalence of high-entropy logs in distributed systems has significantly raised the risk of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) seeping into our logs, which can result in security and compliance issues. This talk delves into the crucial task of identifying and managing this issue using the Elastic Stack. We will explore using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Pattern matching to detect, assess, and, where feasible, redact PII from logs that are being ingested into Elasticsearch.

About Stephen
Stephen Brown is a Sr Principal, Customer Enterprise Specialist with Elastic for over 7 years. He is part of our Customer Engineering Specialist Team and works with some of our largest customers. He is a bit of a Data Geek with 25+ years of experience in Software and Data Engineering, Data Analytics, and IT Operations.

Title: DevOps Adaptability: My Strategy To Be The Human in the Loop - Rich Horace

DevOps has always been about adaptability, and navigating the AI revolution is no different. The challenge is effectively merging proven DevOps practices with an AI-First strategy. Join me as I share my personal strategy for bridging this gap. I’ll walk you through the ongoing steps I take to future-proof myself, including the three essential non-AI subscriptions that keep my core DevOps knowledge sharp and ensure I remain a valuable 'human in the loop.'

About Rich

Rich Horace is the Principal Consultant at SecretSauceOps. He's been passionate about DevOps since the early days, recognizing its potential to help teams work smarter and drive business success. Over his career, Rich has built and led data-driven DevOps teams for SaaS companies in online advertising (Nativo, Fox, MySpace) and gained valuable experience in Corporate IT at Nestle and EMC.

These days, he's channeling his passion for automation and problem-solving to help clients achieve their DevOps goals. Rich has also been an active member of the LA tech community, organizing the Elastic LA Meetup since 2015 and joining the LA DevOps Meetup as an organizer in 2025.