You can tell I am awesome at this self-promotion business as it took Mr Graeme Matheson to point out that a mailing list for the new book would be a good idea. Thanks Graeme! So I added one and you can sign up for announcements and updates on the book here. All email will only be used for purposes of good and I promise not to spam, sell or otherwise abuse your email.

I’m pleased to announce I am working on a new book: The LogStash Book. The book will be a practical, hands-on guide to deploying a log management infrastructure with open source tool LogStash. The planned publication date will be Feb 2013 and it’ll be available to download as a PDF, via Kindle and potentially on other ebook formats. I’ve published a table of contents on the book site. I am also looking for a technical reviewer for the book.

I’ve been playing with AppFirst which is a new monitoring solution that describes itself as the “DevOps Dashboard”. Collectors are used on each host to gather data and you can also enable NRPE-style checks. As part of playing with the solution I’ve written a module that installs the required collector on Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu platforms. The module also includes a type and provider to manage installing and maintaining the NRPE-style checks.

So the big news of the week is that The Girl and I are relocating from Portland to New York in December. Specifically to Brooklyn because you really can’t be a Portlander without living in Brooklyn I’ve been reliably told. We’ve enjoyed living in Portland but we’ve decided that if we’re going to stay in the US for a few more years we’d like to try living somewhere some other places too.

A while back the team at Square released a time series collection and analysis tool called Cube. With the exception of the undergraduate pun name, it’s a really neat tool. It’s built on Node and MongoDB and has a simple to use collector and a sparse but practical evaluator that includes a fairly usable web interface. I’ve written a Puppet report processor that sends each log event from a Puppet run to Cube as an event labelled puppet_log with the data portion of the event being the Puppet client’s hostname and the contents of the log event: