The Docker Book version 1.3.1 I am pleased to announce version 1.3.1 of The Docker Book is out! It has a lot of updates and fixes for the Docker 1.3.1 release. It also contains a bunch of errata and fixes thanks to my wonderful community of readers. How do I get the update? If you’ve bought the book you can use your existing download link to upload the updated book. If you have issues with the link then let me know and I’ll re-issue your link.

I am gathering some statistical data for a conference talk on IT monitoring that I am giving next year. I am hoping you will all be interested in responding to a quick survey about your IT monitoring environment. It’s a totally anonymous and very simple survey that takes about 3-4 minutes to answer. The link to the survey is here. Thanks in advance!

Part of tidying up my module management is automating publishing of my Forge modules. One of my biggest gripes about the Forge is that I need to go the site and do point-n-click things to update modules. That annoys me. I’d much prefer a nice simple command line interface that I can automate as part of the build process. So I went looking for options and found Puppet Blacksmith. It’s a Ruby Gem written by the team at MaestroDev that provides some Rake tasks for automating the uploading of new Puppet module versions to the Forge.

Puppet Labs recently released Puppet Strings which is a Puppet Face that is a proposed replacement for the puppet doc command. The Puppet Strings face uses YARD and the Puppet Parser to generate HTML documentation about Puppet manifests and Puppet extensions written in Ruby. I thought I’d try it on the module that I maintain for Sensu. Installation Puppet Strings is pretty easy to install. It’s under regular development though so you should be sure to keep it up to date.

This is another post triggered by writing The Art of Monitoring. You can join the mailing list on that site for further information and updates. See also my post on structured logging. One of the challenges of centralized logging is that log formats blossom like umbrellas in cheap cocktails. One of the few apparent exceptions to this is Syslog. I mean it is governed by an RFC right? It’s a standard in logging right?