The DevOps hype produces some strange effects. Not only do tool vendors try to jump on the DevOps band wagon by declaring their products “DevOps inside” or listing DevOps as a feature, but companies start to look for a “DevOp” in their job ads. Don’t be misled! Here’s what DevOps is really about:
Monitoring
While a lot of attention is given to network monitoring, holistic system monitoring is a prerequisite of any professional IT infrastructure. We review a number of monitoring tools covering topics from performance monitoring to server monitoring.
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I’d like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They’ve had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot.
To deliver customer value rapidly, it’s important that developers and operations work together closely. There are certain traits of organizations which make it either harder or simpler for both to collaborate. In this post, I want to show you three examples which make DevOps simpler.
I’d recently ordered a new round of servers and was positively dreading having to setup Nagios & Munin on them. This is where the fact that I’m a “born & raised” developer really shines through. The configuration of Nagios is simply beyond me. No matter how much documentation I read, I just can’t get all [...]
After following Dan’s tutorial on installing munin on your servers, you already get the benefits of munin’s default plugins. You have graphs showing your CPU, RAM, I/O, as well as MySQL, Exim, and quite some other stats. But most of the time you run some additional software which you also want to montior.
We’re running separate zones for web, app, and db servers. To be able to know the health of our application and our servers, we rely on pnp4nagios for graphing performance data like CPU utilization, memory usage, etc. Using OpenSolaris zones, there is only one OS kernel running. This is different in e.g. XEN, where every [...]
Testing Dash Metrics with Cucumber (Bradley Taylor) – A short article showing off a Cucumber feature for monitoring with Nagios. Kanban vs. Scrum (Henrik Kniberg) – A great, 26 page long PDF about the similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban. Absolutely worth reading! Reconnoiter (Theo Schlossnagle) – Theo and his OmniTI Labs are working [...]
Read about my ideas for Test First in Operations at The Build Doctor. Julian Simpson (@simpsonjulian) is “The Build Doctor”, or as he states it: Blogger, professional build manager, systems administrator, caffiene addict, dad. We already had the pleasure to publish his great post Partitions and Warfare. Check out Julians posts there. It’s worth it!
When you’re running any business critical application, you need to know what’s going on with it. Is it up? Does it cause extended load on your servers? Does it have enough disk space left, how fast is the data on the disk growing, etc. To know all that, you need a tool which a) monitors [...]
This is a guest post by Thomas Eisenbarth. Thomas studied computer science at the University of Augsburg, currently works at BINconsult GmbH, Berlin and co-founded makandra GmbH in Augsburg. He and his teams develop and operate web applications. As Dan discussed already in Getting a Grip on your Operations with Munin and 10 Seconds A [...]
