Following the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability in Log4J2, Elastic Security and Observability tools provide a comprehensive approach to defending networks by integrating security analytics with application performance monitoring (APM), logs, and metrics. The blog post by James Spiteri explains how these tools can offer deep visibility and assist security analysts in conducting root cause analysis of potential exploits. It walks through a hypothetical scenario where a Java application is exploited, detailing the steps taken by a security analyst team to investigate alerts, identify a suspicious Java process, and confirm the presence of a Log4Shell exploit using various features within Kibana, such as correlated logs and traces, Osquery, and the APM view. The investigation highlights the power of combining observability and security data within the same platform, although it acknowledges the challenges of instrumenting applications to this extent. Elastic aims to simplify the process and improve accessibility for organizations seeking similar insights.