6 – 10 February offered a nice mix of developer and sys admin tips, hardware and consulting news as well as general software food for thought.
Along these lines, Julian discovered the software complexity behind iPhones’ ‘home’ button, while Sebastian shared his tip for backing up MySQL with LVM snapshots.
Jannis then offered four JavaScript/HTML features for developers to impress their friends with – cross origin resource sharing, manifest files, deferred scripts and error objects.
Birger briefly reported on an Icinga project at Pegasus, transforming RDD files into SQL-ready performance data.
Lastly, Martin reassured shoppers at our hardware store, that there are alternatives to the much loved, but discontinued Teltonika ModemUSB/G10 GSM.
NETWAYS Blog
Weekly Snap: NoSQL in MySQL, a Project at Deutsche Post & a New Apprentice
3 – 7 October thanked the monitoring team at Deutsche Post for being such a pleasure to work with and passed on news of the latest NoSQL/MySQL developments. Also, our newest junior addition in the development team Johannes, shared his first impressions and anticipation of all that is to come on board NETWAYS.
Birger followed with the realisation that the Deutsche Post was more electronic and less paper-laden than often thought. In a consulting project in Einbeck, he helped oil the IT infrastructure that ensures the paper post’s timely delivery. Implementing a mirrored monitoring environment with Icinga Core, Icinga Web, LConf, Business Process View, Grapher and Icinga Reporting, the end result offered something for both admins and management.
Meanwhile, Sebastian forwarded news of a preview release to provide NoSQL access methods in MySQL. Via memcached, the InnoDB Storage Engine can be accessed through the InnoDB APIs, bypassing the SQL Optimizer and Query Processing. This enables the best performance, while still offering InnoDB features such as row level locking and transactions, bringing the best of both worlds together. More information can be found on the InnoDB blog, as well as an installation guide.
Project of the month: Nagios templates for configuration clarity
September 2009: When Schüco approached NETWAYS, they had a basic, sluggish Nagios installation they wanted to expand and optimise. With over 46 locations around the globe and 650 devices to monitor, Schüco was looking for support in the coming configuration chaos. Inadvertently, config details were replicated many times over, sitting in large unstructured files so that Schüco admins simply had too much information and no overview.
The first task for consultant William was to restructure their config files into a tree and added template functionality. This suited their multiuser admin needs and simplifying their file structure in turn simplified configuration work. Instead of changing a config variable over 40 times, with templates they now only needed to do it twice.
On this new tidy configuration base, he could then expand the monitoring system’s capabilities to include the usual suspects: EventDB, PNP4Nagios, Nagvis, NETWAYSPortal, SMS alerts, business processes and even Jasper reports. As William customised the NETWAYSPortal for Schüco, he enhanced the SLA view to make target SLAs easier to compare with ‘actual availability’. After a good 20 days work on and offsite, their new state of the art monitoring system was up and running at optimum efficiency. Kudos to that.
Enhanced SLA View for easy target vs. actual availability comparison
