This is a guest post by James Turnbull (@kartar) The first two guys I worked for in Ops jobs were old school mainframe guys. Both of them were kind of rough around the edges. Both heavy smokers who liked a drink and who been around before there were PCs, thought client-server was a passing fad [...]
After using LogicMonitor for almost two months now I’ve become quite comfortable with it’s interface and very secure with it’s monitoring. I’ve been asked by a few folks for some of the more technical details on it’s operation which I’ll share with you here.
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 [...]
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 [...]
Have you ever taken a midnight drive down a dirt road without any headlights on? While its certainly a thrilling (and stupid) thing to do, I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing the same thing with your data center. Do you have any idea if the load your servers experienced this morning was unusually high? Could you [...]