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,-€. [...]
What happens when there are broken disks and degraded RAID volumes and nobody knows about them? Monitoring disks and RAID volumes is a fundamental part of rolling out a monitoring solution. Unfortunately, manufactures for RAID controllers create their own tooling, which makes it difficult to monitor them using generic monitoring protocols. If you are familiar with [...]
Network Attached Storage devices are very popular in small or medium offices or at home to store and share data. Synology is one of the manufactures who build their devices with SNMP support to provide monitoring and managment capabilities. This makes it very easy to let OpenNMS keep an eye on your NAS and it can tell [...]
System has high load! Sounds anything but perfect. At least when we are talking about servers. Fortunately, I don't have to explain what load is or how it's defined because there are many explanations on the internet. I found my favorite one on blog.scoutapp.com. Once you read the article, you know that the ideal load on a [...]
Hey folks, maybe you still remember the discussion about the Statusbox feature which Markus started at the Easterhack session. At that time I already liked the idea and to be honest, I was a little bit disappointed that it wasn't possible to complete it on this weekend. After some days I read Markus' comment in his pull request: As this feature [...]
Recently, we have been working on a project called "Helm" which will integrate a convenient OpenNMS alarm dashboard into Grafana. As part of that process, we have been developing a pure-JavaScript API for interacting with OpenNMS's ReST services called "OpenNMS.js". OpenNMS.js is primarily designed for developers, making it easy to write Node.js or browser tools for performing actions in [...]
As soon you provide more than a handful of services monitoring and centralized logging becomes essential. Especially when you run the Net-SNMP daemon with Docker you will notice your logs get spamed with some messages like Cannot statfs /run/docker/netns/...: Permission denied everytime you query for performance data. The Wiki article is a small guide how to configure the [...]