Tag: Monitoring

Introduction

In this article, we will be reviewing the Chef software, how it works, and why it is useful. We will also explore how it is helpful in DevOps. And then, we will install Chef on Ubuntu 18.04. 

Configuration management is the process by which a company or organization defines and tracks the state of its infrastructural resources. Encapsulated in those resources are both physical hardware and software. It is a means to ensure that when changes are made to a system, those changes are tracked, geared toward the ultimate predefined criteria of what state should be.

What is Puppet?

Puppet is a cross-platform client-server based application used for configuration management. It handles the software and its configurations on multiple servers. There are two versions available. One is open-source, the other is a commercial version. It works on both Linux and Windows platforms. It uses a declarative approach to automate updates, installations, and other tasks. This feature allows the software to configure those systems using files called manifests. A manifest contains the instructions for a group or type of server(s) being controlled. 

High availability is the description of a system designed to be fault-tolerant, highly dependable, operates continuously without intervention, or having a single point of failure. These systems are highly sought after to increase the availability and uptime required to keep an infrastructure running without issue. The following characteristics define a High Availability system.

What is nmcli?

nmcli stands for Network Management Command-Line Interface, and is a tool for managing the NetworkManager application and reporting on the status of the network. It can be utilized as a substitution for nm-applet or other similar graphical clients. nmcli is used to display, create, delete, edit, activate, deactivate network connections, and control and display network device status.

Introduction

SNMP, or Simple Network Management Protocol, is widely used to communicate with and monitor network devices, servers, and more, all via IP. In the previous article, we installed an SNMP agent on a CentOS 6.5 server. This agent allows for the collection of data from our server and makes the information available to a remote SNMP manager. To add a little security, we’ll now change the port that SNMP listens on.

What is Grafana?

This article is a step-by-step guide on how to install Grafana software on CentOS 8 server. Grafana is a popular open-source visualization and analytics monitoring software. It renders graphs, charts, and alerts when connected to supported data sources. It is commonly used with time series databases like Prometheus, SQL databases like MySQL logging, and document databases like Loki, etc. You can additionally install hundreds of plugins and dashboards from the official library. 

Today, DevOps teams try to utilize automation as much as possible. This is to cut down on the sheer number of repeatable processes to limit man-hours worked, throttle development efforts, and to reduce the possibility of errors. This is also a business necessity to reduce overhead costs, increase the speed of the CI/CD process and increase customer satisfaction. There are multiple individual areas that need to be automated to have a fully autonomous infrastructure. Luckily, there are various tools we can take advantage of to help us automate our infrastructure and make sure we have well-developed DevOps processes. In this article we will go over the several of the best DevOps tools for our infrastructure systems.

Today we will demonstrate how to install Envoy Proxy on Ubuntu.