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Monitoring – it’s all about integration and automation – OSMC 2017 Day 2

von | Nov 23, 2017 | Technology, Events, OSMC, IT Automation, Icinga

OSMC 2017
The second day started with „Monitoring – dos and don’ts“ presented by Markus Thiel. Room was already full on the first talk what was not expected when people move from evening event to late lounge and then at 5 o’clock in the morning to the hotel. Event was great great with good food, drinks and chat. But Julia already wrote about that so I will focus on the talks and Markus one was nicely showing „don’ts“ I also recognize from my daily work as consultant and helped with tips how to avoid them. He got deeply into details so I can not repeat everything, but just to summarize the biggest problem is always communication between people or systems, perhaps you already knew this from your daily business.
The second talk I attended was Bodo Schulz talking about automated and distributed monitoring of a continuous integration platform. He created his own service discovery named Brain which discovers services and put them into Redis which is then read by Icinga 2 and Grafana for creating configuration. Pinky is his simple stack for visualisation consisting of containers. Both of them are integrated in the platform, one Brain for every pipeline, one Pinky for every team. If you did not get the reference. watch the intro on youtube. His workarounds for features he missed were also quite interesting like implementing his own certificate signing service for Icinga 2 or displaying License data in Grafana. And of course he had a live demo to show all this fancy stuff which was great to see.
Tom was giving the third talk of the day about automated monitoring in heterogeneous environments showing real life scenarios using the Director’s capabilities. He started with the basics explaining how import, synchronization and jobs work and followed by importing from an old Icinga environment utilizing SQL and the IDO database. In the typical scenario for importing from a CMDB Tom showed typical problems like bad quality of input data and how to workaround with the Director to get a good quality of output. Another scenario explained how to get data from Active Directory for the Windows part of your environment. For VMware users he show the already released vSphere module and also the prototype of the vSphereDB module which adds some more visualization and for AWS users the corresponding module. And the last one showed how to import Excel files using the Fileshipper. And of course he explained how easy it is to create your own import source.
Right after the excellent lunch and the even better event massage Marianne Spiller’s talk „Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst (… und das ist CRITICAL!)“ (in English „I spy with my little eye something CRITICAL!“) focused on how to get a good monitoring environment with a high user acceptance up and running. Being realistic and show everyone his benefits are the best tips she gave but also she could not provide the one solution that fits all. For more of her tips ranging from technical to organizational I can recommend her blog.
Lennart and Janina Tritschler were talking about distributed Icinga 2 environments automated by Puppet. Really happy to see the talk because Janina adopted Icinga 2 after a fundamentals training I gave about a year ago. They started with a basic introduction of distributed monitoring with Icinga 2 as master, satellite and agent and configuration management with Puppet including exported resources. Afterwards they were diving deeper into the Puppet module for Icinga 2 and how to use it for installation and configuration of the environment. In their demos they included several virtual machines to show how easily this can be done.
In the last break the winner of the gambling at the evening event got his price, a retro game console.
Last but not least I decided for Kevin Honka’s talk „Icinga 2 + Director, flexible Thresholds with Ansible“ in favor of Thomas talking about troubleshooting Icinga2. But I am sure his talk was great as troubleshooting is his daily business as our Lead Support Engineer. Kevin was unhappy with static threshold configured in their Monitoring environment so started to develop a python script to include in his Ansible workflow which modifies thresholds using the Director API. On his roadmap is extending it by creating a Icinga 2 python library usable for others, utilizing this library in a real Ansible module and extending functionality.
Thanks to all speakers, attendees and sponsors leaving today for the great conference, save travels and see you next year on November 5th – 8th for the next OSMC. And of course a nice dinner and happy hacking to all staying for the hackathon tomorrow, I will keep our readers informed on the crazy things we manage to build.

Dirk Götz
Dirk Götz
Principal Consultant

Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Puppet, Ansible, Foreman und andere Systems-Management-Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich wie nun bei NETWAYS.

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