Category Archive: monitoring

Jun 24

Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards

I wanted a simple way to have a dashboard to show if hosts and services are alive & didn’t want to write much code and/or run up a nagios instance (or anything like that). All I care is whether it’s green or red. I’d already been setting up HAProxy for a proxy forwarder, so I …

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Apr 25

Rules for Operations

The Big Three

The following list was compiled in 2012 for a talk on Operations Principles for Developers (Ops4Devs). They are loosely inspired by the list of rules from Zombieland as well as from my experiences and those shared by others. Looking over the list four years later, I believe that they are still (very) applicable for all …

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Aug 01

Cloudy Update

I’ve been working with Docker a good bit and have updated my list of tools.  Here’s a quick dump of where I am in the design of the infrastructure. collectd will be used to monitor cgroup statistics.  This necessitates compiling all or part of collectd — the current packages do not contain the cgroup plugin. …

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Sep 22

JRuby + jmx4r + rrd4j == Easy reporting on app servers (part I)

Portion of a JConsole screen

This is a how-to for using jmx and rrd4j, a java implementation of rrdtool, to report on app server statistics. Thanks to Jeff Mesnil(author of jmx4r), Werner Schuster (JMX the Ruby way with jmx4r), sishen (JRobin sucks), and the rrd4j team. You’ll need the following: JVM 1.5 or higher — JRE is not enough, you …

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