Recently, I upgraded my home server to run Ubuntu 15.04 from the previous 14.04 LTS version. The upgrade (via 14.10) was a breeze, aside from the pain in the arse of systemd and having to fix things like plexmediaserver which were no longer running – ugh.
I’ve recently been on a bit of an integration push witah Opsview, wanting to have my software integrate with other software tools to make not only my customers lives easier, my also my own!
At Opsview, I run a range of tools from JIRA and Jenkins, through to Opsview – and also look at Twitter, Salesforce and more. This is a lot of stuff, therefore as mentioned in my late 2014 piece “Collaboration and innovation in 2014” I wanted to find a way to unify all of this disparate information into a single source of truth, or as marketers like to say “Single pane of glass”, yikes.
A common problem I face on a daily basis is a lack of hardware / resource in order to test things out to the fullest. For example, in days gone by I’d have needed 3 servers for what i’m about to do – and in more recent times, 3 virtual machines. I dont have the time to continuously build these items, nor the resource if we were going physical. This is where my new found interest in Docker can help me out!
What I want to do on my Ubuntu ‘host’ server is create 3 Docker containers running Redis, and link them all together so that I can then develop and test the best way to monitor h-scaled Redis. Below I will show you how i’ve done it, and the benefits (even beauty) of it!
Over Christmas/New Years I had a fair amount of spare time for relaxation; so naturally this was spent tinkering around with various bits of software and kit I havent had time to play with during the past few months. One of the things I wanted to test and try in anger was Docker; a wrapper/software suite that wraps LXC into something a bit more usable. There is a video below that explains what Docker is and how it works:
Recently I thought i’d re-do all of my ELK stack setup, as i didnt fully understand every facet of it and i was really interested in introducing Redis into the mix. I’ve also messed around with the existing Kibana and Logstash front-end to the point it was fairly bricked, so it was ripe for a change.
What I wanted to get to, was having my 2 servers and my main router having their logs and syslog data sent into my log box so I could view and correlate across multiple systems.
This is a brief blog post to explain how I quickly integrated my existing Opsview server, with my existing ELK deployment. I basically wanted a way that within Opsview, i can see that a host has failed or is having problems and go “Hmm, lets have a look at the logs to see whats happening” without:
A) Having to SSH to the box and start tailing or
B) Have to fire up ELK and start filtering.
As part of my Slack evangelism I’ve been hellbent on trying to integrate as many products I/we use into the aforementioned tool, to test out where the limit is on what this awesome product can do. Next on my list of things is IRC – that old warhorse. Opsview has a large number of users on IRC, yet I continually forget to start my IRC client after reboots, etc meaning i miss out on all the useful questions, comments and other items that our community have to offer.
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