Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

ELK - Not Just For The Nice Visitors

Most of the applications we see for the ELK stack are from businesses which want to improve their customers' experience. To return relevant search results and to create Kibana dashboards that allow them to analyse data and give the customers what they want. But there are some cases where the customer is always wrong, and where the last thing you want to do is give a site visitor what he wants. Welcome to the world of forensics, compliance and fraud detection.

Special IP Address Ranges and When to Use Them

By even casual observation, you’ll likely have noticed that there are several IP address ranges that are special, including: Anybody can use these “private” ranges for anything they like. But there are actually several other special ranges that have other special purposes. In this article, I’ll explain what they are and the purpose they serve. This is the “loopback” range. These are addresses that are assumed to be on the same device that’s sending the packet.

Build your API first

I have a beef with companies that don’t expose nearly everything their product can do with an API. I get anxious wondering, “why can I only do some of the things via the API? How is this sausage made?” Sure, there are plenty of examples of endpoints that shouldn’t be exposed, such as changing passwords probably should be kept private. Regardless, there are tons of examples of products that I can type in a field in the UI, but that field isn’t available in the API.

Get Started with Kubernetes

Brief introduction to understanding Kubernetes basics Kubernetes is a broad platform that consists of more than a dozen different tools and components. Among the most important are: If you use Kubernetes to manage containers, this will require a container runtime, which is the software that runs individual containers. Kubernetes supports a number of container runtimes; the most popular are Docker, containerd, and cri-o.

NoSQL databases: what is MongoDB and its use cases?

Databases like MongoDB, a NoSQL document database, are commonly used in environments where flexibility is required with big, unstructured data with ever-changing schemas. This post explains what a NoSQL database is, and provides an overview of MongoDB, its use cases and a solution for running an open source MongoDB database at scale.

The best of the PowerShell Gallery, right in your PE Console

PowerShell DSC might be the new kid on the block when it comes to configuration management, but it's certainly not lacking in power. DSC resources offer unprecedented hooks into the Windows operating system and provide straightforward configuration functionality that will make your Unix coworkers green with envy. It's a shame it's not easier to use….

How we use the Grafana GitHub plugin to track outstanding pull requests

First of all, we’re pleased to announce the first release of the GitHub data source. The source code is available at github.com/grafana/github-datasource. Contributions, feature requests, and bug reports are welcome. Using the GitHub data source, Grafana users can visualize data from GitHub’s API. In this blog, we’ll go over some use cases for this handy plugin.

The Diagnose: How Support Works at AppSignal

Setting up AppSignal isn’t as complex as rocket science. Developer experience is really important to us, as AppSignal started as a way to scratch our itch. We also put a lot of effort in providing you with a first-class developer support. In fact, our developers are the ones answering all of your your technical questions. This is why we’ve added a diagnose tool to our Node.js integration.

Aggregate Data with Elasticsearch Data Frames

Ingesting various events and documents into Elasticsearch is great for detailed analysis but when it comes to the common need to analyze data from a higher level, we need to aggregate the individual event data for more interesting insights. This is where Elasticsearch Data Frames come in. Aggregation queries do a lot of this heavy lifting, but sometimes we need to prebake the aggregations for better performance and more options for analysis and machine learning.

Integrating Ansible and Docker for a CI/CD Pipeline Using Jenkins

In this guide, we will use Ansible as a Deployment tool in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment process using Jenkins Job. In the world of CI/CD process, Jenkins is a popular tool for provisioning development/production environments as well as application deployment through pipeline flow. Still, sometimes, it gets overwhelming to maintain the application's status, and script reusability becomes harder as the project grows.