Kibana is the web UI to visualize data in the data store called Elasticsearch. It’s the user facing component in the Elastic Stack, formerly called ELK stack. This post is based on previous posts which show the basics of Logstash and Elasticsearch and will talk about a few ways how Kibana can help you make sense out of your logs.
This post is my recap of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon conference which took place in Copenhagen (Denmark) from May 1-4, 2018. I’ll go briefly through the sessions I attended and the notes I took.
Ubuntu is great in my opinion, and of the reasons for it is its use of recent versions for the packages in their APT repositories. But what if you need a package in an even more recent version and cannot wait for the next release? The Debian Sid release, the unstable development version, has those newer packages and they can be used in an Ubuntu with the help of APT package pinning and this post shows the things you need to know for that.
The Go programming language is currently fashionable, and it’s been four years since the last time I started to learn a new programming language (Python), so I decided to start a series about my learning attempts. As I also want to know more about Kubernetes, my goal is to learn enough Go in the next few months to read the Kubernetes code base comfortably. As a starting point for this multi-part series, I’ve chosen Conway’s Game of Life [1], because its rules are simple but more complex than a typical hello world example.
This is a short quick tip about Ansible. TL;DR: it’s possible to use a wildcard in the target hosts specifier. This became useful to me when I dynamically created the inventory based on Ansible facts.
Presentation slides. They can be a great tool for communicating ideas to others. I was looking for a way to create slide decks where I can specify the content as plain text and have it separate to the rendering. I’m sure this is somehow possible with PowerPoint or OpenOffice, but I didn’t bother to look for it. This post shows how I specify the content in a Markdown file and let it render by Reveal.js which I packed into a Docker image.
This is a follow-up to the previous post Elastic Stack (formerly ELK) - Logstash (Part 1). We continue were we left of the last time, and dive right into it. No intro, no explanation of concepts or terms, only configuration of Logstash pipelines.
In this post I’ll talk about the Logstash service, which is part of the Elastic Stack, formerly known as ELK stack. The purpose of Logstash is to ingest (logging) data, do some transformation or filtering on it, and output it into a data store like Elasticsearch. For details about Elasticsearch, you can get more information in my previous post Elastic Stack (formerly ELK) - Elasticsearch.
When it comes to documenting your project, especially the non-code parts, you might face a plethora of opinions what the “correct approach” might be. Some love Word documents, some favor PowerPoint slides and some like documents written in a markup language. I’m one of the latter. This post will show my favorite, reStructuredText with Sphinx. It will list the capabilities I usually need when documenting, and how to do it with the features of Sphinx and reStructuredText.
This is a short quick tip. When executing Ansible playbooks, you might need to execute a task as another user than the one you established the connection with. This post shows an example how to do it and deal with the environment variables.
When something goes wrong in an environment, the people trying to fix it mostly start by looking at the log files persisted on the local filesystem of the server. This gets more cumbersome the more server and services participate. Highly distributed applications, developed and deployed as microservices in a cloud environment exacerbate this too. A centralized logging server helps to ease the pain. In this post I’ll talk about the popular Elasticsearch service, which is part of the Elastic Stack, formerly known as ELK stack.