Posts tagged Monitoring
Monitoring, a journey
Jan 9th
Or “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love SaaS”
I touched on monitoring in an earlier post but I thought that I would expand on my thoughts.
Let me just get this out there: LogicMonitor (company site) is awesome. It’s not perfect (what is?), but it’s amazing, simple, straightforward, and it works. It combines effective monitoring with graphing (metrics); it’s easy to understand and customize and it works.
Repeat: It works.
More >
Setting up a LogicMonitor Agent
Dec 30th
LogicMonitor is a really cool server and network monitoring and measurement system which we’ve been working with. It uses a lightweight monitoring agent installed on your local network which collects data from your systems and passes it over SSL to an external aggregator. It’s capable of auto-discovery and is mostly self-configuring though you can adjust many of the metrics. After many years of working with patchwork monitoring and alert systems we’re pretty excited about it. Call us if you’re interested.
Setting up a monitoring agent on your local network is easy. The server hosting the agent just needs a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed using version 1.6 or greater and must be able to make an outgoing SSL connection. To monitor Windows systems, you’ll need to install the agent on a Windows server.
Logic Monitor through screen shots
Dec 12th
This is the part where I talk about LogicMonitor as a part of our ipHouse internal learning enrichment task. I am going to do this through screen shots because it works for me and I hope you learn a little along the way.
I was in great need of Nick’s help because at first I thought I could create just any host name. So of course I chose the name barf. Well you can’t do that. You need to use a machine name that already exists. Nick said I should choose smtpgrey-2.iphouse.net or smtpgrey-1.iphouse.net (inbound SMTP border servers in use on our network).
Once I figured that out it was all smooth sailing!
Infrastructure and Other Games, Part 4
Dec 8th
Part 4: The Other Stuff
Thanks for reading my series on moving from my single all-in-one server and my small ESXi server to ipHouse’s vmForge VDC product. I previously discussed moving my websites to a virtual webcluster, and moving email to a virtual mailcluster. Now I just had to move three small servers, and install a third.
The first server I moved was a small experimental VM used for testing various network, web and other items. I like to have dedicated testing environment for every operating system that I professionally run. This server was responsible for my personal Teredo tunneling, and was the one I put my CGI testing on from awhile a go. I could have easily moved it, but I wanted see how the export/import from ESXi to vmForge worked. I stopped the machine on my ESXi server, downloaded it as a OVF and uploaded it, via my Windows machine, to my catalog. It imported it as a template. I then deployed the template and deleted the server. It worked flawlessly! All I had to do renumber the machine and I was done. More >
Infrastructure and Other Games, Part 1
Nov 10th
Part 1: VDC, Layout and Firewall.
I had a problem. All of my personal infrastructure was on an aging server, cobbled together from various parts that were laying around. I had already replaced the motherboard once, and I was not looking forward to doing more maintenance. The system had 5 320gb SATA disks in a RAID 5 setup. Not very fast, and it could only survive one disk failure.
Software-wise the machine had long exceeded what it was designed to do. It was originally designed as a game server, with some web and email. I had added several other services to it as I learned and played. Data was spilling out of its assigned slices. Symlinks were used strategically but it was still a mess. More >
