Monitoring Blog
Release announcements, technical guides and monitoring insights from the ConSol team.
First ConSol FedEx Day
Friday, December 20, 2013 in Insights
For most employees at ConSol, today is the last day before their Christmas vacation. Eight of us took that opportunity and organized our first FedEx day: During the full day event, we formed small teams and worked on innovative projects we are enthusiastic about. At the end of the day, we had small presentations showing the results to the company. In this blog post we’d like to share the projects we came up with: Infinispan Cluster on Raspberry Pis There seem to be a lot of interest in building Raspberry Pi clusters for demo projects. One of the teams took the chance and built our own, with five Pis running an Infinispan distributed cache. It turns out that having a real hardware cluster yields different results than testing Infinispan locally. While clean shutdowns and startups are no …
OMD 1.10 Release
Tuesday, December 17, 2013 in Insights
The developer team of OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution) released the version 1.10 today. This version contains lots of updated packages including Thruk 1.80, Mod-Gearman 1.4.14, NagVis 1.8, check_mk 1.2.2p3 and many more. Using the OMD Repository installation is as simple as a apt-get install omd. If you have an rpm-based system, it's as simple as yum install omd or zypper install omd.
Nagios belches Lava
Monday, December 02, 2013 in Insights
This is the story, how I increased Nagios’ WAF by hooking up a Lava Lamp for notifying when the wood-burning stove needs to be inflamed. The problem I’m trying to solve was quite simple. Since about 6 years I’m living in a so called “passive house”, a house with a very good isolation and very low energy consumption. One part of the concept is a so called 1000 l heat storage tank, which has three layers of water with different temperature levels. Energy comes in either from the roof via solar panels or by heating with an wood-burning stove. Except for the winter, the energy collected by the solar collectors is sufficient for taking a warm shower and everything else. However, in winter external heating with the stove when the temperature in the storage drops below 45 degrees celsius is …
Business Prozesse mit Nagios und Thruk
Sunday, November 03, 2013 in Insights
Business Prozesse in Nagios zu modellieren gehört zu den beinahe täglich anstehenden Aufgaben beim Thema Monitoring. Die neueste Thruk Version (v1.78) bringt nun ein Business Prozess Addon mit dem sich Prozesse einfach per Gui modellieren lassen. Und so siehts aus Die zur Berechnung benötigten Daten werden von Livestatus bezogen, somit sind zum einen Business Prozesse über mehrere Sites hinweg möglich und zum anderen beschleunigt das die Berechnung immens. So können mehrere hundert Prozesse pro Sekunde durchgerechnet werden. Die neueste Version steht unter [www.thruk.org][1] zum Download bereit. Wer nur mal schauen will, kann dies auf der [Demo Instanz][2] machen. Die wichtigsten Features Web-Editor Aggregation von Hosts, Services, Hostgruppen und Servicegruppen Auswahl nach Hard oder Soft …
Infinispan Talk: Slides are online
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 in Insights
Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking on Infinispan at the JBoss One Day Talk 2013. Slides can be found here: http://rawgithub.com/ConSol/reveal.js/2013-jbossOneDayTalk/index.html. See you tomorrow!
OMD-1.00 für Raspberry Pi ist fertig
Friday, September 20, 2013 in Insights
Lange hat’s gedauert, aber seit heute kann man sich das Debian-Paket für OMD-1.00 vom ConSol-Labs-Repository herunterladen. root@raspberrypi:~# apt-get install omd-1.00 Die Maschinen unserer Kunden, auf denen wir uns tagtäglich bewegen und Monitoring-Systeme betreiben, haben üblicherweise CPUs und Gigabytes im zweistelligen Bereich. Da wird es schon zur Geduldsprobe, wenn ein Build auf dem Raspberry Pi den halben Tag braucht. Ein ARM11 ist eben kein Xeon und SD ist nicht SSD. Ein Odroid-XU, den ich letzte Woche bekommen habe, hat mir sehr geholfen. Mit seinen 8 Cores (wobei 4 stromsparende, langsame Cores und 4 stromfressende, schnelle Cores sich die Arbeit je nach Lastprofil teilen) dauert es keine zwei Stunden, OMD zu kompilieren. (Kostet an die 100€, ist aber eine Rakete im Vergleich …
Offline-Modus für check_nwc_health
Tuesday, September 10, 2013 in Insights
Offline-Betrieb von check_nwc_health Der eine oder andere check_nwc_health-Anwender dürfte --mode walk schon kennen. Damit kann man sich eine Liste von snmpwalk-Anweisungen ausgeben lassen, deren Resultat mir beim Debugging hilft. check_nwc_health --mode walk --hostname 172.23.60.28 --community public rm -f /tmp/snmpwalk_check_nwc_health_172.23.60.28 snmpwalk -ObentU -v2c -c public 172.23.60.28 1.3.6.1.2.1 >> /tmp/snmpwalk_check_nwc_health_172.23.60.28 snmpwalk -ObentU -v2c -c public 172.23.60.28 1.3.6.1.4.1.9 >> /tmp/snmpwalk_check_nwc_health_172.23.60.28 snmpwalk -ObentU -v2c -c public 172.23.60.28 1.3.6.1.4.1.9.1 >> /tmp/snmpwalk_check_nwc_health_172.23.60.28 snmpwalk -ObentU -v2c -c public 172.23.60.28 1.3.6.1.4.1.9.2 >> /tmp/snmpwalk_check_nwc_health_172.23.60.28 ... Die resultierende …
Infinispan JPA 2nd Level Caching on JBoss AS 7 - Minimal Working Example
Monday, September 09, 2013 in Insights
Infinispan is included in the JBoss AS 7 distribution as the default second level cache for Hibernate. For my presentation on the JBoss One Day Talk 2013, I was looking for the most simple example to be used in a demo. This post shows how to get Infinispan Hibernate 2nd Level Caching up and running in five minutes. It should also work with the upcoming WildFly Application Server. Step 1: Example Project from Maven Archetype JBoss have prepared a maven archetype that can be used to create a simple JEE web application. We use this application as a a starting point: mvn archetype:generate \ -DarchetypeArtifactId=jboss-javaee6-webapp-archetype \ -DarchetypeGroupId=org.jboss.spec.archetypes \ -DarchetypeVersion=7.1.2.Final \ -DgroupId=de.consol.research \ -DartifactId=infinispan-jpa-example \ …
Debian/Ubuntu dist-upgrade keeping OMD
Wednesday, August 21, 2013 in Insights
Changing major releases on linux is always a risk, but Debian / Ubuntu dist-upgrades really worked fine the last years. If you are using OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution) for Nagios/Icinga/Shinken, then the release-update would disabled 3rd party repositorys and therefore remove your OMD installations during the update. This is usually not what you want, but with a small trick, updates work smoothly. First step: make sure you made backups make sure all your sites use latest stable OMD release OMD daily Snapshot releases will be removed during the update because the snapshot version is probably not longer available. After a quick check via “omd sites” i had to update my development site: #> omd sites SITE VERSION COMMENTS devel 0.57.20130607 thruktest 1.00 modgearmantest 1.00 But thanks to …
Distributed Caches Shootout
Tuesday, July 02, 2013 in Insights
Distributed caches have evolved into an independent branch of Big Data solutions: When it comes to fast read and write access, distributed caches are the solution of choice. Dr. Fabian Stäber gave a talk a JayDay 2013 where he introduced and compared the leading distributed cache implementations: Ehcache / Terracotta Hazelcast Infinispan Based on a simple example application, the basic functionality is presented, and the specific strengths and weaknesses of the different cache architectures are highlighted and compared. The results of this ‘shootout’ and an executive summary can be found here at Java caches and the example application is available from GitHub. Start here …