Insights
Database testing with Citrus
Thursday, March 01, 2018 in Insights
Database communication is an essential part of many applications, when persistent data storage is required. May it be orders, customer data, product recommendations or product information, if persistent storage is in place, the data contains a certain business value. Therefore it’s important that your software handles your persistent storage the right way. In this blog post you’ll learn how to test your database communication using Citrus.
FOSDEM Video: Monitoring Legacy Java Applications with Prometheus
Sunday, February 04, 2018 in Insights
At this year’s FOSDEM conference I did a 30 minutes presentation on Monitoring Legacy Java Applications with Prometheus. The talk gives an overview of some of the options you have for monitoring Java applications with Prometheus when you cannot modify the application’s source code: Logfile monitoring (grok_exporter), and how it differs from Elastic stack Blackbox monitoring (blackbox_exporter) JMX (jmx_exporter) Write your own Java agent (promagent.io) The video is available on the FOSDEM website linked below.
Application monitoring in OpenShift with Prometheus and Grafana
Friday, January 19, 2018 in Insights
There are a lot of articles that show how to monitor an OpenShift cluster (including the monitoring of Nodes and the underlying hardware) with Prometheus running in the same OpenShift cluster. This article however is based on a different scenario: You are responsible for an application on an OpenShift cluster and want to monitor just this application, but you don’t have any administrative permission on it. The reason for this can be that you are working in a big company where the operation of the OpenShift environment is outsourced or the process to introduce a new monitoring solution takes way too long or the current monitoring solution doesn’t match your requirements and so on. In this article I’m going to show you how to setup the monitoring of a demo application in 6 easy steps. The example is built in that manner that it will be easy for you to do the same for your application. A side note: If the OpenShift cluster that you are using will be monitored in the future with a different Prometheus setup, you don’t need to start from scratch. You might need to tweak the configuration of your scraping a bit and you need to move your dashboard to a different Grafana but that should be it.
Automated debugging with git
Friday, January 12, 2018 in Insights
Imagine your’re working on a bigger feature in a complex piece of software. Your implementation is complete, all tests in scope turned green and you push your changes for integration testing. Then, some integration tests from a completely different module fail and you have no clue which change may have caused this. Now you start analyzing the issue. Probing your commits by hand would end up in a very tedious process for sure. Thankfully git can do all the work for you, while you enjoy a cup of coffee. The high-level command git bisect allows you to automatically run a specified test procedure, while it’s crawling through your commit history to find the bad revision.