Monitoring Blog
Release announcements, technical guides and monitoring insights from the ConSol team.
How to add an application to a Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh
Friday, August 07, 2020 in Insights
During a discussion with a customer, we talked about which steps are necessary to add an application to a services mesh. Which should be no big deal. Unfortunately, there is not a simple guideline how to do that for the Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh. Furthermore, I was not sure how the requests for the application would look like in Jaeger. To clarify these points, I created a small application. Which I then deployed on OpenShift and added it to a service mesh control plane. This is the documentation of the steps that I have done. The demo application The created demo application can call other applications and mocks internal processing. Hence, I’m fluent in Java, I created a Java REST-Service that takes a message and a counter. The response returns the message. The counter determines …
Unofficial guideline to get the latest and greatest version of Kiali in OpenShift
Monday, May 18, 2020 in Insights
During this year’s Red Hat Summit I had the chance to get a glimpse of the latest version of Kiali. This version had some nice features, like the traffic flow of the application graph during a time period (Graph replay). It also contains wizards to create destination rules and virtual services. This demo has struck my curiosity to get the hands on this Kiali version. One obstacle for me was that my Kiali is running in Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh and is controlled by the Kiali operator. Currently, it is using version 1.12. The version that I wanted to try was the latest release version (1.17). The Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh does not support this version. This article describes what we need to do in order to replace the Kiali version of an Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh with the …
Simple example how to use Istio and Keycloak
Thursday, May 07, 2020 in Insights
Some time ago, I did a webinar about the RedHat Service Mesh, which is based on Istio. For this webinar, I prepared a demo application. Among other things, I wanted to show how to do the authentication with JWT token in general and, more specific, with Keycloak. This article will describe how to configure Keycloak. In the second article, I will show you what problems I encountered running the application in Istio and how I figured out what was wrong in my configuration. You can find the article here Set up the demo application As basis for my demo application I used the application of the awesome Red Hat Istio tutorial. The only exception I made was to use my own docker repo and to create a single yaml file to setup the application along with the Istio configuration. The yaml with the …
Debugging Istio
Thursday, May 07, 2020 in Insights
In the article, I’m going to describe what we can do, if we configured our application to use Istio, but it is not working like intended. Originally, I wanted to give a detailed description what problems I encountered during the creation of my webinar and how I fixed them. However, I came to a point where this would be a very long one. I hope that you don’t mind that I shortened it and just describe which tools are available to debug the Istio configuration. In my previous article I described how to configure Keycloak for my webinar. So without further ado, let’s start. Certificate problem After deploying my application and the Istio configuration, everything seemed to run. There were no errors in the logs of my pods. I ran a small script to call my demo application in a loop with the …
OpenShift 4.3 installation on VMware vSphere with static IPs
Friday, January 31, 2020 in Insights
In this article, I will show you how to install Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 (OCP) on VMware vSphere with static IPs addresses using the openshift installer in UPI mode and terraform. In contrast to the official OpenShift 4.3 install documentation, we will not use DHCP for the nodes and will not setup the nodes manually - instead we will use static IP addresses and terraform to setup the virtual machines in our vCenter. TOC {:toc} Since this article will not describe basic requirements like the minimum VMware vSphere version, a good start would be to consult the official OpenShift documentation: https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.3/installing/installing_vsphere/installing-vsphere.html{:target="_blank"} Infrastructure / Nodes Let’s take a look at the hosts we will …
Installing MongoDB on OpenShift
Tuesday, January 14, 2020 in Insights
So here is another one of our series Installing Blahblahblah on OpenShift. This time it is about getting MongoDB to run on OpenShift - the way recommended and promoted by the MongoDB guys. The whole setup is still in beta stage as indicated on these two entries in Red Hat’s container image catalog. You can get your MongoDB instance up and running on OpenShift. But most of the required steps have to be performed on the command line, contrary to the impression given by MongoDB, Inc that once you get the MongoDB Operations Manager up and running everything can be achieved via this tool’s GUI. Some operations in the Operations Manager simply do not work (yet) on OpenShift. When I last had to work with MongoDB back in 2015 and 2016 (version 3.0 and 3.2) installing this NoSQL database was a …
CodeReady Containers on Ubuntu
Friday, November 29, 2019 in Insights
With the release of OpenShift 4.x Red Hat left no stone unturned (compared to previous 3.x versions). Among many things Minishift became Red Hat CodeReady Containers. Having been a big fan of Minishift I recently wanted to give CodeReady Containers (aka CRC) a try. Turned out this is not that easy - at least if you want to run CRC on a Linux that does not come from Red Hat (or its community). This article gives instructions for all those people out there who want to run CodeReady Containers on Ubuntu. Update 2020-12-17: According to this comment on GitHub by one of the maintainers / developers of Red Hat CodeReady Containers the issues with Ubuntu have been resolved in the latest version of CRC. First lesson I had to learn was that CodeReady Containers does not run with VirtualBox - at …
Introduction to AWS CDK
Monday, November 04, 2019 in Insights
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is a relatively new kid on the block. It is a tool for defining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and is considered to be the future successor of AWS CloudFormation. This article overviews the IaC approach, introduces a reader to the AWS CDK, shows what problems it aims to solve and presents a simple example application implemented with it. tl;dr IaC is all about automating the provisioning process of an infrastructure. This automation helps you iterate faster. AWS CDK has reached a stable 1.x version. However, at the time of writing many of its comprising modules are still experimental. CloudFormation is still the “official” answer to the question “How do I do IaC in AWS?” If you are using CDK and unhappy with it, you can let CDK generate CloudFormation …
Introduction to Spring Boot and GraphQL for API Design Pt. 2
Thursday, September 26, 2019 in Insights
GraphQL is a nice way to publish a highly customizable API. In combination with Spring Boot, which makes development really easy and offers features like database integration and security, you can quickly build your API service from scratch. This is the second part of the series in which we will create a REST-Service based on Spring Boot which will be translated in a GraphQL Service in the 3rd part of this little series. Introduction In the first part of this series we already learned about REST and GraphQL. I explained what each of them is good for and in which case you should use REST and when you should use GraphQL instead. In this part we will create a REST WebService based on Spring Boot which will be transformed to GraphQL in the third part of this series. The service which we will …
Installing GitLab on OpenShift
Wednesday, July 31, 2019 in Insights
We recently had to install a bunch of applications on a customer’s shiny new OpenShift 3.11 cluster. Among others also GitLab. Turned out getting GitLab up and running on OpenShift is not so easy. What I found on the Internet about installing GitLab on OpenShift was partly outdated and not 100% accurate. Most information was about getting GitLab into a Kubernetes cluster. So I had to adapt these information to the situation in an OpenShift cluster. This article is the conclusion of all these findings and efforts and gives a step-by-step recipe on how to install GitLab on OpenShift. GitLab will be installed by means of a group of Helm charts initially intended for Kubernetes. With some tweaks this can also be used for an OpenShift installation. Some links Installing GitLab on OpenShift …