The open-source Zabbix monitoring solution has a REST API that provides the ability for deep integrations with your existing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems. This fosters development of community-driven modules like Ryan Day’s zabbix Go language package, which is an easy way to automate Zabbix tasks like creating hosts and manipulating other back end structures. One of the nice things … Zabbix: Zabbix REST API using a Go client
Using 3rd party packages from github is made very simple in the Go language with the import statement. But one problem is that “go get” will always pull the HEAD of the master branch and there is no way to explicitly specify another branch. The ultimate answer would be to use a package dependency manager like Glide, which … GoLang: Vendor directory for github branches other than master
A nice feature of the Go language is the ability to build binaries for multiple platforms directly from a single source system. As an example, even from a development Windows 7 32-bit machine, you can build binaries for both 64 bit Linux and Windows 2012 Servers. Before Go 1.5, you needed a compiler for the target architecture, … GoLang: Cross Compiling for Linux and Windows platforms
The Go programming language has gotten considerable momentum, and the fact that it compiles down to machine code has made it popular in containers like Docker where a single executable binary fits the execution model perfectly. This article will detail installation on Ubuntu 14.04 with the standard hello world validation.
An issue that keeps coming up on the mailing lists as well as Stackoverflow[1,2] is how to merge multiple pillar files for use with a single state. The problem is that pillars using the same key overwrite each other, and there is no easy way to express the desire to merge instead. There are various workarounds, but all … SaltStack: Combine multiple pillar files under a single key
Logstash has a rich set of filters, and you can even write your own, but often this is not necessary since there is a out-of-the-box filter that allows you to embed Ruby code directly in the configuration file. Using logstash-filter-ruby, you can use all the power of Ruby string manipulation to parse an exotic regular expression, … ELK: Using Ruby in Logstash filters
SaltStack has the ability to create custom states, grains, and external pillars. There is a long list of standard external pillars ranging from those which read from local JSON files, to those that pull from EC2, MongoDB, etcd, and MySQL. In this article, we will use Apache ZooKeeper as the storage facility for our SaltStack … SaltStack: Creating a ZooKeeper External Pillar using Python
Python is a language whose advantages are well documented, and the fact that it has become ubiquitous on most Linux distributions makes it well suited for quick scripting duties. In this article I’ll go through an example of using Python to read entries from a JSON file, and from each of those entries create a … Python: Using Python, JSON, and Jinja2 to construct a set of Logstash filters
Before running state.apply against a minion, especially in a production environment, a good sanity test can be to list the states that will be executed without actually running those states. This can be done by adding tests=True to the end of the state command. For example, to check all the states that will be applied … SaltStack: Validating States of Minion without Execution
It is more popular to use an ssh key instead of a password when automating a git clone from a guest OS. But if you do need to specify the password directly into the console command, it takes this form: $ git clone https://<user>:<password>@<gitserver>/<path>/<repo>.git Which works fine if the password is plaintext, but if it … GIT: Calling git clone using password with special character
It is time consuming to restart the entire Logstash service and refeed it input when working on a grokparsefailure. Here is an easy way to test a line of input or log file against a grok pattern:
When working from the Windows command line, you can do a quick test to validate your SMTP connectivity using PowerShell: c:\> Powershell -executionpolicy bypass PS c:\> Send-MailMessage –to <TO> –from <FROM> –subject “testing123” –body “this is a test” –smtpserver <SMTPServer> -port 25 And if the mail server is accessed over TLS/SSL with SMTP authentication … Sending SMTP Mail from Windows Using PowerShell