Trying out Sonic, a lightweight Rust search backend, by running it in Docker and ingesting fake name data with a Ruby client
$ grep -rl '#devops' ~/posts/# 88matches
Sonic the search engine A bit of a Vector Trying out Vector, a Rust-based observability data router from Timber.io that aims to replace Logstash, Telegraf, and Fluent
Prometheus Walking through installing and configuring Prometheus to scrape time series data, query metrics, and trigger alerts on a local Docker daemon
The Packer Book Announcing a hands-on book covering Packer installation, provisioning, Docker integration, infrastructure tests, pipelines, and plug-in development
The Terraform Book open for pre-orders Opening pre-orders for a hands-on Terraform book covering installation, provisioning, collaboration, multi-environment architecture, and infrastructure testing
The Terraform Book Announcing a hands-on introduction to Terraform covering providers, provisioning, data sources, remote state, and integration with other tools
The Docker Book 1.12.2 released! Version 1.12.2 of The Docker Book is out, a near total rewrite for the Docker 1.12.1 release with refreshed examples and best practices
The Art of Monitoring released! Announcing the release of my book on building modern monitoring with Riemann, Graphite, collectd, Logstash, and friends
Managing maintenance with Riemann Suppressing Riemann alerts during planned work by injecting maintenance events into the index and wrapping notifications with a check function
Structured Logging Why string based logs hurt machine consumption, and how to emit typed structured events from a Rails app with Lograge and Logstash-logger
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Data Publishing the anonymised CSV source data from the 2015 monitoring survey for anyone who wants to do their own analysis
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Effectiveness When checks get added, how many alerts go unanswered, and how widely configuration management is used in 2015 monitoring environments
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Metrics Which tools respondents use to collect, store, and visualise metrics, and what they do with the data in the 2015 survey
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Environments Server, cloud, network, application, and business logic coverage across respondents in the 2015 monitoring survey results
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Tools Nagios still leads in 2015 with AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and a surge of home grown tooling close behind
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Demographics Comparing 2015 job roles, organisation sizes, and monitoring ownership against last year's results across 884 complete responses
Monitoring Survey 2015 - Background Introducing the 15 questions and methodology behind the 2015 edition of the monitoring survey with 1,116 responses
The Art of Monitoring sample chapter Announcing a free sample chapter from my new monitoring book, covering the installation and use of Riemann
Monitoring Survey 2015 Launching the second annual monitoring survey at Monitorama to track how the monitoring landscape has shifted over the past year
Looking up events in the Riemann index Using riemann.index/search inside a custom mailer body to pull related events from the Riemann index and attach context to email alerts
Connecting Riemann and Zookeeper Looking up HAProxy node counts in Zookeeper from a Riemann stream so monitoring thresholds update without waiting for configuration convergence
Just Enough Clojure for Riemann A crash course in Clojure syntax, collections, functions, and namespaces that gets you ready to write Riemann configuration files
Custom emails with Riemann Using the Riemann mailer plug-in's :subject and :body options to build custom email alerts driven by event fields like host
The Art of Monitoring Announcing a hands on book on building modern, scalable monitoring with Riemann, Graphite, Sensu, Flapjack, and Logstash
Riemann Sample Configurations Asking the community to contribute real Riemann configurations to a shared GitHub repository to help newcomers learn the Clojure based config
Using Riemann for Metrics Installing Graphite, configuring Carbon retention schemas, and forwarding Riemann events to generate metric graphs from Nginx status data
A Monitoring Maturity Model A simple three stage model, manual, reactive, and proactive, for describing how organisations evolve their monitoring practices
Using Riemann for Fault Detection Using Riemann streams and the index to detect down services via TTL expiry, then routing alerts to email and PagerDuty
An Introduction to Riemann Installing Riemann and walking through its event-centric push model for aggregating, processing, and alerting on events from hosts and applications
The Docker Book 1.4.1 released! Version 1.4.1 of The Docker Book is out, with updates and fixes for the Docker 1.4.1 release plus accumulated reader errata
Monitoring Survey - Data Releasing the anonymised CSV source data from the 2014 monitoring survey along with notes on the R and ggplot2 analysis
Monitoring Survey - Effectiveness Looking at unanswered alerts, undetected outages, and configuration management adoption across the 2014 survey responses
Monitoring Survey - Environments Examining what infrastructure layers respondents monitor and when checks are added during the 2014 survey results
Monitoring Survey - Metrics Looking at who collects metrics and what they collect them for in the 2014 monitoring survey responses
Monitoring Survey - Tools Nagios leads the 2014 primary tool results with Icinga, Sensu, Zabbix, and New Relic also figuring strongly
Monitoring Survey - Background Outlining the 12 questions, methodology, and 1,016 respondents that drove the 2014 monitoring maturity survey
Monitoring Survey - Demographics Breaking down job roles, organisation sizes, and who owns monitoring across the 866 complete responses to the 2014 survey
The Docker Book 1.3.1 released! Version 1.3.1 of The Docker Book is out, with updates and fixes for the Docker 1.3.1 release plus reader contributed errata
Monitoring Survey Asking readers to fill in a short anonymous survey on IT monitoring to gather data for a conference talk
Using Puppet Blacksmith Installing and configuring Puppet Blacksmith Rake tasks to automate version bumps, tagging, building, and pushing modules to the Forge
Getting Started with Puppet Strings Installing the Puppet Strings face, running it against the Sensu module, and publishing the generated HTML documentation to GitHub Pages
When Logstash and Syslog go wrong Replacing Logstash's syslog input with tcp, udp, and grok plugins so you can catch non-RFC syslog variants and route failed parses to a file
A Whole Lot of Heka Installing and configuring Mozilla's Go-based logging tool Heka, comparing it to Logstash for tailing files and routing events
The Docker Book - Consul Version 1.2.0 of The Docker Book is out, adding a section in chapter 7 on using Consul for service discovery with Docker
The Docker Book - a new chapter Version 1.1.0 of The Docker Book is out, with a new chapter on orchestration focused on Fig and the usual update instructions
The Docker Book released! Announcing the 1.0 release of The Docker Book, with download details for pre-orders and a roadmap for future updates
Useful Docker Bash functions and aliases A handful of Bash aliases and functions for daily Docker work, including inspecting IPs, bulk removing containers and images, and tagging builds
Logstash Book Updated for 1.4 The Logstash Book has been revised for the 1.4.0 release, covering new installation methods, configuration language changes, and plugin updates
Building Puppet-based applications inside Docker Combining Dockerfiles with Librarian-Puppet to reuse existing Puppet modules when building application images, demonstrated with Nginx
Beginnings with Docker Inc Leaving Venmo after the PayPal acquisition to join Docker Inc as VP of Services, building out support, training, and professional services
Docker and Configuration Management Why Docker and configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef will coexist rather than one supplanting the other
Seeking technical reviewer for Docker book Looking for unpaid technical reviewers for an upcoming Docker book, with a credit and bio in the front matter as the reward
How to make change in corporate environments Tactics for cutting through change theatre and blame culture in ITIL-heavy shops by showing safe repeatable changes and centring customer needs
Puppet and New Relic Deployments Releasing a module that ships deployment events from Puppet to the New Relic Deployment API via a custom type or a report processor
The Docker Book Announcing a new book on Docker covering installation, containers, services, building your own PaaS, and writing custom images
The LogStash Book released! Announcing the release of a book on deploying log management with LogStash, available as PDF, ePub, or Kindle edition
Monitoring Sucks - A Rant Why Nagios and its kin fail virtualised and cloud environments, and why a fresh paradigm is needed to handle the new scale
The LogStash Book sample chapter available A free sample chapter is now available covering how to get logs into LogStash without using the LogStash agent
Puppet Types and Providers - The Book Nan Liu and Dan Bode have written a whole book on developing Puppet types and providers, available on Kindle and in print
The LogStash Book Announcing work on a hands-on book about deploying log management infrastructure with the open source LogStash tool, due February 2013
Puppet and AppFirst Releasing a module that installs the AppFirst collector on Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu and adds a type and provider for managing NRPE checks
Puppet Linter Supports Private Repos Adding GitHub OAuth2 support to the Puppet Online Linter so authorised private repositories can now be linted on commit
Is DevOps the new silo? Worrying that naming a team DevOps just relocates the silo problem instead of changing the culture, process, and tooling underneath
1 min read#devopsPSigner - signing Puppet certificates via API Releasing a small Sinatra prototype called PSigner that exposes an API for signing Puppet certificates as a starting point for extension
Puppet Online Linter GitHub Hook Adding a GitHub post-receive hook to the Puppet Online Linter so each commit gets parsed, linted, and emailed back to the committer
Puppet Online Linter Launching a small Sinatra service that accepts Puppet manifest uploads or API submissions and returns lint errors on screen
Boundary module released Releasing v1.0.0 of the Puppet module to install, manage, and report to Boundary, now available on the Forge
Yana and Puppet A small external node classifier that pulls node definitions from the Yana node authority and maps Yana tags and attributes into Puppet
James & Nigel A short post sharing an animated graphic a colleague made of me alongside Nigel from the Spinal Tap movie
Cloudkick and Puppet Releasing a Puppet module that handles Cloudkick agent installation and node creation via the Cloudkick API
Sensu An early look at Sensu, Sonian's RabbitMQ based cloud monitoring framework, plus a Puppet module and Vagrant file for trying it
Boundary A look at Boundary's network and flow monitoring tool and a Puppet module I wrote to deploy their probes
Why am I a tool maker? Why I keep publishing small open source tools and plug-ins on GitHub: ego, career value, learning, and paying back what other sysadmins gave me
Mafia Trying out Mafia, a Sinatra application generator, and contributing a binary plus a default action to scratch my own itch
Tally A small Sinatra and DataMapper scoreboard built for Puppet Labs ticket triage days, fed by a Redmine plugin that emits update events
Bunraku - A Puppet Status Panel A Sinatra and Redis prototype that displays Puppet run statuses by collecting reports via a custom Puppet report processor
Puppet & Noah Releasing a Puppet integration for John Vincent's Noah configuration store with an ENC, get and put functions, and a config fact
Pro Puppet released! Announcing that the book Jeff McCune and I wrote is now shipping, complete with the proper index readers asked for
The State of DevOps A pointer to my guest post on the Agile Web Operations blog covering DevOps, smoking, operations, and occasional swearing
Status of Puppet on Windows An update on porting Puppet to Windows by David Schmitt and Markus, with a link to the in-progress branch on GitHub for testing
DevOpsDownUnder - What the Fuck is DevOps? Slides from my DevOps DownUnder talk are now up on Slideshare
1 min read#devopsYes Mum, still behaving Using Cucumber Scenario Outlines to collapse repetitive infrastructure tests into a single template fed by a table of example values
What the fuck is DevOps? Announcing my talk at the inaugural DevOpsDownUnder conference exploring the competing definitions of DevOps and whether there is even a debate
1 min read#devopsJames White's Rules for Infrastructure James White's rules for treating infrastructure as one self-correcting system, for buying small interoperable software, and for API-driven automation
2 min read#devopsWhat DevOps means to me Why dev and ops need to merge, and four quadrants I see as the heart of DevOps: simplicity, relationships, process and automation, continuous improvement
The Tortoise and not the Hare 2 - Principles Listing the seven Toyota Production System principles that map most directly to IT operations and previewing how to apply each one
The Tortoise and not the Hare - Part 1 Drawing parallels between manufacturing production lines and IT operations, and introducing Toyota Production System concepts like lean, JIT, and Kanban
Yes Mum, I'll Behave: Beginning Behaviour Driven Infrastructure Applying Behaviour Driven Development to infrastructure monitoring using Cucumber and Cucumber-Nagios to test that services actually do what users expect