Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Creating Azure VM images with Packer and Puppet Bolt

HashiCorp Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer makes it easy to codify VM images for Microsoft Azure. In this blog post we’ll look at how to use HashiCorp Packer and Puppet Bolt to define our VM templates in code.

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 to Reduce MTTR with PagerDuty and Relay

DevOps and SRE teams are under intense pressure to reduce the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) in resolving incidents. With the proliferation of cloud services and the increasing complexity of DevOps toolchains, engineers today need to not only learn how to use these services but also troubleshoot them when an incident is raised at 2 AM. Incident response is still manual today – cobbling together runbooks and ad hoc scripts and orchestrating people to respond.

Automation and changing needs, featuring Forrester

In an ever-changing world, the future of work is changing as well, and it has accelerated some areas of automation that we were already moving toward. I sat down with our guest speaker, Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research, for a webinar to discuss these questions and get a better understanding around how automation plays an important role in supporting companies through crises and preparing them for an uncertain future.

Datadog and Relay for Incident Response

Datadog is an awesome tool for aggregating and visualizing the metrics that matter to you. Recently, Datadog launched a new Incident Management feature, which allows you to coordinate the activities around a problem that affected your service. In this example, I’ll walk through using Relay to roll back a Kubernetes deployment that caused a service impact, and show how the Datadog Incident timeline can keep everyone working on the incident in sync.

The Event-Driven Web is Not the Future

When you see a notification on your smartphone, your brain processes the request quickly and determines how to react. It’s an efficient process and your nervous system is built for this use case. By contrast, most Internet-connected systems work in a less event-driven architecture. If there’s a change in one service, you won’t know about it until you check.

Authenticate Puppet Enterprise with FreeIPA using LDAP

Using a Linux Domain controller such as Red Hat Identity Management or FreeIPA? If so then the fields are a bit different than some other LDAP interfaces, which makes it difficult for some to connect to for authentication. Here is a quick how-to on setting up Puppet Enterprise with authentication from FreeIPA. I am assuming that you already have Puppet Enterprise installed with eyaml configured. If not, then you may want to visit these prerequisites.