author: Tarus Balog It is hard to believe that our first release of OpenNMS Meridian was over three years ago. We were struggling with trying to balance the needs of a support organization with the open source desire to “release early, release often”. How do you deal with wanting to be as cutting edge as possible but to [...]
Monitoring services or metrics and getting alarms isn't complicated. A more interesting question is: How to fix them (fast)? Monitoring systems, even in small or middle sized environments, creates a lot of different alarms. When you are working in a team, sometimes the person who creates a test or configures a threshold that throws an alarm [...]
In OpenNMS we use Atlassian Bamboo which runs all our tests and build also the packages which can be installed on different operating systems. It plays an important role as quality gate for changes going into the code base. Our Bamboo is public available and can be seen by everyone. There are two type of branches, one following a pattern [...]
Our UK OpenNMS ambassador, Craig Gallen, gave us a hint about a meeting from the Irish Network Operators Group (iNOG) followed by a 2 day Network Operators Tools Hackathon co-hosted by Ripe NCC. I've attended a few NOG meetings already and like the tech-driven and very friendly atmosphere. Luckily, The OpenNMS Group sponsored the trip and so I was able to [...]
Sometimes you have to set a specific OpenNMS daemon to DEBUG mode to find issues in your configuration. Depending of the environments size OpenNMS can create many log entries while being in DEBUG mode. But in some cases the log rotation is faster than an editor can open a log file and the amount of logs [...]
Running a Minion with Docker is relatively easy, you just need to have Docker installed. It makes also updating the Minion very easy cause you can follow the tags latest for latest stable version or trying a bleeding snapshot. You can configure everything through environment variables. At a bare minimum you need something like this: docker run --rm -d \ [...]
Running applications in containers provides many benefits, and it's not just hype. Higher velocity to maintain changes while keeping a service available. Scaling your software by just spinning up more instances to handle load. Container images allow you to manage your application dependencies and link them all to a portable and standardised runnable container image. The [...]
The current release workflow for PRIS and the Docker Container Images was driven by manual tasks. That means you have to push a "Release Button" which sets version numbers and triggers Docker Image builds. I have switched to a continuous delivery workflow. Every commit is a release and there is no "Release Button" anymore. Unique version [...]
A monitoring solution should always help in bad situations and provide a useful overview of your system health status. Service availability monitors are especially handy to ensure that all services are running on the correct machines. In past, I have run into an problem which was more of an issue with documentation than a classical monitor [...]
People familiar with production lines are familiar with using Stack Lights to indicate the status of a machine. Wouldn't it be cool to have something similar as a status indicator for your IT-Infrastructure? This question is probably ~20 years old and we've ended up with things like the USB Table Traffic Light that you can buy now for arround 70,-€. [...]