Monitoring Blog
Release announcements, technical guides and monitoring insights from the ConSol team.
NEB Modules with Go
Friday, September 01, 2017 in Insights
Have you ever written a NEB (Nagios Event Broker) module? This article will explain a tool which makes this a lot easier, especially if the reason was that you are not familiar with C or C++. In this case the “Go NEB Wrapper” could come very handy and if you are new to this topic it is a good point to start with. Pre-note Everything I explain on “Nagios” as monitoring core in the following also applies to Icinga and Naemon. Introduction First, there will be an introduction of the importance of NEB modules and the context they are used, followed by a briefly overview of the Go NEB Wrapper. Continuing with an conclusion and further informations. Maybe you are already using a NEB module if you have a Nagios Server, but you are just not aware of the fact. The most well-known modules are MK …
OMD 2.60 Labs Edition Released
Monday, August 21, 2017 in Insights
OMD Labs Edition 2.60 has been released today. The OMD Labs Edition is based on the standard OMD but adds some more useful addons like Grafana and Prometheus or additional cores like Icinga 2 and Naemon. This release updates many of the shiped components and adds some interesting options when resolving update conflicts. Whats new Updates All components have been updated to their latest stable releases including Thruk 2.16-2 Icinga 2 2.7.0 Mod-Gearman 3.0.5 Grafana 4.4.1 Prometheus 1.7.1 InfluxDb 1.3.3 New platforms supported This OMD release comes with new prebuild packages for Debian 10, Fedora 26 and Ubuntu 17.04. New merge options This release adds the ‘vimdiff’ to the possible options when resolving merge conflicts during OMD updates. ‘vimdiff’ is also available as OMD command when …
Automated CI/CD Build Pipeline with Jenkis in OpenShift
Monday, July 17, 2017 in Insights
The GitHub repository toschneck/openshift-example-bakery-ci-pipeline contains, the sourcecode for the examples of the talk Continuous Testing: Integration- und UI-Testing mit OpenShift-Build-Pipelines at the Redhat/ConSol OpenShift-Day: The example shows, how we can setup up total automated build pipeline with following components: OpenShift Build Pipelines Jenkinsfile Docker Maven Citrus Sakuli For the complete sourcecode and description please visit: toschneck/openshift-example-bakery-ci-pipeline Slides: Continuous Testing: Integration- und UI-Testing mit OpenShift-Build-Pipelines from Tobias Schneck
Introduction to GitLab CI with Maven
Friday, July 14, 2017 in Insights
At ConSol we use GitLab as our central Git server and I am quite happy with its functionality. Lately, I have been playing around with GitLab CI with the objective of finding out if we can use it instead of Jenkins, our current CI server of choice. Since most of our projects use Maven, I was particularly interested in setting up a simple Maven build job. To cut a long story short, yes, I would use GitLab CI in my next project. We’ll later see why, but first I want to give a quick walkthrough of GitLab CI. Requirements To be able to try it out for yourself you need: A GitLab server with Pipelines activated A GitLab user with Master role in a project A spare server where GitLab CI agents can run (can be your own computer) How GitLab CI works GitLab follows an agent based approach, i.e. …
Introducing Citrus Admin Web UI
Tuesday, July 11, 2017 in Insights
It has been a while since the last release in the Citrus universe. It took us some time to get the new Citrus release 2.7.2 ready for you. Of course we were not being lazy in that time. Besides the new Citrus 2.7.2 release we are proud to announce a new player in the Citrus team. The Citrus administration UI is a web-based user interface that helps you to manage your Citrus projects and test cases. Often users complained about the complexity of having to learn all about Citrus and the Spring framework in particular as Citrus uses Spring for configuration and dependency injection. Especially non-developers had problems to master the learning curve for Citrus and Spring when starting to use the framework. Also people asked for a way to have a user interface for managing components and tests. …
Prometheus Monitoring for Java Web Applications without Modifying Their Source Code
Monday, July 10, 2017 in Insights
The Prometheus monitoring tool follows a white-box monitoring approach: Applications actively provide metrics about their internal state to the Prometheus server. In order to instrument an application with Prometheus metrics, you have to add a metrics library and use that library in the application’s source code. However, DevOps teams do not always have the option to modify the source code of the applications they are running. Promagent is a Java agent using Bytecode manipulation for instrumenting Java Web applications without modifying their source code. Promagent allows you to get white-box metrics for Java Web applications even if these applications do not implement any metrics library out-of-the-box. Promagent currently implements two metrics: HTTP: Number and duration of web …
OMD 2.40 Labs Edition Released on Raspberry Pi
Wednesday, June 14, 2017 in Insights
OMD Labs Edition 2.40 for the Raspberry Pi has been released today. A month and a broken SD card (excessive use of /var/swap during the builds) after the release of the x86 version it is now possible to run a full-blown monitoring system on your ARM boards. It was tested on Raspberry 2 and Raspberry 3. If you want to run OMD on one of the older models, you might experience performance problems, especially when you enable InfluxDB and Grafana. root@raspberrypi:~# aptitude search omd p customdeb - Modfies binary Debian package p isomd5sum - ISO9660 checksum utilities p libtemplate-provider-fromdata-perl - module to load templates from your __DATA__ section p omd-2.40-labs-edition - OMD Labs Edition - Open Source Monitoring Distribution (Labs Edit p omd-labs-edition - Open Source Monitoring …
OMD 2.40 Labs Edition Released
Wednesday, May 17, 2017 in Insights
OMD Labs Edition 2.40 has been released today. The OMD Labs Edition is based on the standard OMD but adds some more useful addons like Grafana and Influxdb or additional cores like Icinga 2 and Naemon. This releases focus is on security and maintainance and removes some recently discovered CVEs in Nagios, Icinga and Naemon. Whats new Updates All components have been updated to their latest stable releases including Thruk 2.14-2 Naemon 1.0.6 Icinga 2 2.6.3 Mod-Gearman 3.0.2 Grafana 4.2 New platforms supported This OMD release comes with prebuild packages for Fedora 25 and SLES 12SP2. New backup format This release includes a new backup format which allows cross platform restores even if the old version is not installed at all. Read more about backups on the OMD Backup Page. Changes The …
Angular, we have to talk!
Tuesday, March 28, 2017 in Insights
About three or four years ago I had the first contact with AngularJs (obviously V1.x) and what should I say? I loved it! It perfectly added the missing piece that JQuery wasnt able to solve: Bind data to the Dom in an easy way. Since this days there where a lot of evolution in Javascriptland. A lot of new Frameworks for entire SPAs, new techniques like functional and reactive programming, a lot (!) of build systems / task manager and even the language itself developed towards an serious programming language (I know some people have a different opinion). At least with the power of Typescript (or Flow) Javascript projects doenst have to be a Pain. Angular2+ took many of the the mordern aspects to provide a good and productive developer experience to develop application in time, quality and …
Protecting Passwords in Java Properties Files on Windows
Monday, March 27, 2017 in Insights
Typical Java backend applications need to integrate with existing 3rd party services. In most cases, calls to these 3rd party services are authenticated. Frequently, Java applications are required to use login credentials for authenticated calls: A username and a password. This scenario raises a problem: How can we store the password needed for calling the 3rd party service? We could store it in a properties file, but then everyone with access to the properties file learns the password. We could provide the password as a command line parameter or environment variable, but then everyone with access to the startup script learns the password. We could hard-code it in our application, but then everyone with access to the JAR file learns the password. We could encrypt the password using a …