2 min
IT Ops
5 Great Blogs for DevOps
If you are a DevOps professional looking to get more involved or further your
learning, or just looking for some entertaining, insightful content, we wanted
to put together a list of 5 great blogs for DevOps. And, we know we missed some,
so feel free comment and share what other blogs should be on here!
A few great blogs that we think you might find valuable:
1. ContinuousDelivery.com [http://continuousdelivery.com/] – Dave Farley and
Jez Humble run this site. Jez is a principal consult
6 min
IT Ops
Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra Cluster Pt. 2 - Solutions
This is the second part of a two part series. Before you read this, you should
go back and read the original article, “Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra
Cluster Pt. 1 – The Problem
[/2014/03/synchronizing-clocks-in-a-cassandra-cluster-pt-1-the-problem/].” In
it, I covered how important clocks are and how bad clocks can be in virtualized
systems (like Amazon EC2) today. In today’s installment, I’m going to cover some
disadvantages of off-the-shelf NTP installations, and how to overcome them.
C
5 min
IT Ops
Synchronizing Clocks In a Cassandra Cluster Pt. 1 - The Problem
Cassandra [https://cassandra.apache.org/] is a highly-distributable NoSQL
database with tunable consistency. What makes it highly distributable makes it
also, in part, vulnerable: the whole deployment must run on synchronized clocks.
It’s quite surprising that, given how crucial this is, it is not covered
sufficiently in literature. And, if it is, it simply refers to installation of a
NTP daemon on each node which – if followed blindly – leads to really bad
consequences. You will find blog post
3 min
IT Ops
DevOps: Vagrant with Chef-Server
In my last blog post, The DevOps Tools We Use & How We Use Them
[/2014/02/the-devops-tools-we-use-how-we-use-them/], I talked about how we use
Chef [http://www.getchef.com/chef/] with Vagrant [http://www.vagrantup.com/] for
managing, maintaining and monitoring our servers. (If you haven’t read it yet, I
suggest you have a quick look at it for reference.) This is great for a
development environment where you spin up servers locally in Virtualbox, however
in doesn’t help much when trying to maint
2 min
IT Ops
How To Run Rsyslog in a Docker Container for Logging
I’ve been playing around with Docker [https://www.docker.io/] this morning (read
as I have followed their 15 min tutorial and have installed it on an Ubuntu
instance – so I’m not quite the expert yet). I was initially interested in
figuring out what log management [https://logentries.com/doc/log-management/]
looks like for any Docker users out there.
From first look, Docker has a “logs” command that will fetch the logs from a
container. You can run this via the docker daemon and it will captu
2 min
IT Ops
Real User Monitoring: I Need Insight And I Need It Now
In the past it was assumed that the web-based interface was the most important,
and often the only, path for a user to access content or a product. But those
days are gone and now companies must embrace supporting multiple interfaces on
different platforms in order to satisfy their users. With customers looking to
use a mix of clients, with the most common being Web, iOS, Android and Windows
Phones, companies need to invest in optimizing for these channels and, hence,
protecting their investment
6 min
IT Ops
Mobile Apps: 6 Steps to A Wealth of Untapped Data
With mobile technology becoming a bigger part of many companies’ front end
coverage, it makes sense to ensure that you are getting a good return on your
investment by delivering a high quality app that works for your users.
With this in mind we are excited to announce the release of our iOS and Android
libraries [https://logentries.com/insights/mobile/]. When used in conjunction
with our JavaScript library, these will give you coverage over virtually your
whole front end.
Mobile adoption for U
3 min
IT Ops
An Inflection Point for Mobile Devices & App Monitoring
You may not have noticed, but history has unfolded before our very eyes in the
past few months, with mobile device sales expected to outpace those of the
traditional laptops for the first time (at least according to IDC research last
September [http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24314413]).
To shed some light on the expected pace of change, by 2017 it’s anticipated that
87% of the worldwide smart connected device market will be tablets and
smartphones, with PCs (both desktop and lapt
2 min
IT Ops
How to Monitor the Health of Your Application and Infrastructure With the Same Solution
With an attractive total cost of ownership of cloud-based solutions versus
on-premise solutions, a highly flexible nature and the ability to scale up
rapidly, there has been a steady increase in companies moving infrastructure out
of racks and into the cloud.
As more companies move their mission critical systems out of their physical
control to these cloud-based solutions, it only makes sense that their
application and machine generated logs are even more important than ever before.
With that
2 min
IT Ops
Amazon S3 Archiving...You asked, we delivered!
One thing we like to think we do well here at Logentries is listen to our
global
user base [/2014/01/global-tags-alerts/]! Something that a lot of you have asked
for recently is log archiving. Ask and you shall receive – we have now opened a
Beta for archiving to Amazon S3. So you can be safe in the knowledge that your
log files will be archived safely every night to a reliable storage facility
should you ever need them in the future. You can also be sure that any
compliance or PCI requirements
4 min
IT Ops
How to Send Log Data via a Proxy Server using Rsyslog
If you have a large number of servers you may have a requirement to
configure proxy servers in various parts of your network to accept messages and
then forward them to a centralized logging solution or service
[https://logentries.com]. We regularly see this with larger customers where it
makes sense to collect logs centrally before sending them on to Logentries for
analysis. In some cases this can be a more stringent requirement where parts of
your network may not have direct access to the publ
3 min
IT Ops
How To Monitor Windows with Logentries
We are often asked at Support questions such as, “How do we use Logentries to
monitor Windows performance stats?” or “Can Logentries get alerts based on CPU
utilization on Windows?” The simple answer is yes, with the help of our
Logentries Agent for Windows [https://logentries.com/doc/agent/] and PowerShell
we can.
Here is a 5 minute tutorial to get you monitoring your CPU, Memory and Disk
Space [https://Logentries.com/product/why-use-us/] with Logentries.
Installing the Logentries Agent
You
6 min
IT Ops
How to Configure Rsyslog with Any Log File; Agents Bad...No Agents Good...
Last week I wrote “In Defense of the Agent [/2013/12/in-defense-of-the-agent/].”
One of the main advantages of using agents is the ability to easily get the
agent configured to monitor logs of any type
[https://Logentries.com/product/why-use-us/] no matter where those logs live on
your file system. We posted the article on Reddit and there were some
interestingcomments
[http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1sjyic/in_defense_of_the_agent/] and
discussion – it’s fairly obvious that there is
3 min
IT Ops
5 Uses for Log Data That You Never Thought Of
When you think of logs, what do you think of? It’s most likely troubleshooting
software applications and the infrastructure that underlies them, keeping an eye
on your production apps…perhaps even database logs and some other things like
that. Traditional log management [https://logentries.com/] stuff…I’m guessing
it’s not sports cars, law enforcement, lighting, marketing metrics, and beer.
Well guess what? It can be!
1) Fact Check a Journalist
Back in February of 2013 The New York Times publis
4 min
Logentries Add-Ons for Heroku Environment pt. 1 – CloudAMQP
We recently announced ouradd-on program at Logentries
[https://logentries.com/doc/addons/], which allows third party vendors to send
their log data toLogentries [https://logentries.com/]< and to highlight
important events for their users via ourtagging, alerting and reporting features
[https://logentries.com/product/features/]. This allows vendors to predefine
what log events their users really need to know about and if there are
particular thresholds that indicate trouble may be looming. Users