Outside of my Oracle cloud-related content, we’ve just published an article on DZone. Those who follow this blog will be familiar with the article theme as it relates to the Log Simulator work. We’ve also written for Devmio – although we don’t yet know when the article will be published and whether the content will be publicly available or behind their paid firewall.
One of the areas I present publicly is the use of Fluentd. including the use of distributed and multiple nodes. As many events have been virtual it has been easy to demo everything from my desktop – everything is set up so I can demo things very easily. While doing this all on one machine does point to how compact and efficient Fluentd is as I can run multiple instances concurrently it does undermine distributed capabilities somewhat.
Add to that I now work for Oracle it makes sense to use OCI resources. With that, I have been developing the scripts to configure Ubuntu VMs to set up the demo environments installing Ruby, Fluentd, and various gems needed and pulling the relevant configurations in. All the assets can be found in the GitHub repository https://github.com/mp3monster/logging-demos. The repository readme includes plenty of information as well.
While I’ve been putting this together using OCI, the fact that everything is based on Ubuntu should mean it can be run locally on VMs, WSL2, and adaptable for MacOS as well. The environment has been configured means you can still run on Ubuntu with a single node if desired.
Additional Log Destinations
As the demo will typically be run on OCI we can not only run the demo with a multinode setup, we have extended the setup with several inclusion files so we can utilize OCI services OpenSearch and OCI Log Analytics. If you don’t want to use these services simply replace the contents of several inclusion files including files with the contents of the dummy_inclusion.conf file provided.
Representation of the Demo setup
The configuration works by each destination having one or two inclusion files. The files with the postfix of label-inclusion.conf contains the configuration to direct traffic to the respective service with a configuration that will push log events at a very high frequency to the destination. The second inclusion file injects the duplication of log events to each service. The inclusion declarations in the main node Fluentd config file references an environment variable that should provide the path to the inclusion file to use. As a result, by changing the environment variable to point to a dummy file it becomes possible o configure out the use of one of the services. The two inclusions mean we can keep the store declarations compact and show multiple labels being used. With the OpenSearch setup, we have a variant of the inclusion file model where the route inclusion can reference the logic that we would use in the label directly within the sore declaration.
The best way to see the use of the inclusions is to experiment with setting the different environment variables to reference the different files and then using the Fluentd dry-run feature (more on this in the book).
Setup script
The setup script performs a number of tasks including:
Pulling from Git all the resources needed in terms of configuration files and folders
Retrieving the necessary plugins against the possibility of their use.
Setting up the various environment variables for:
Slack token
environment variables to reference inclusion files
shortcut environment variables and aliases
network (IP) address for external services such as OpenSearch
Setting up a folder for OCI tokens needed.
Setting up temp folders to be used by OCI Plugins as a file-based cache.
Feeding the log analytics service is a more complex process to set up as the feeds need to have metadata about the events being ingested. The downside is the configuration effort is greater, but the payback is that it becomes easier to extract meaningful information quickly because the service has a greater understanding of the content. For example, attributing the logs to a type of source means the predefined or default log formats are immediately understood, and maximum meaning can be retrieved from the log event.
Going to OCI Log Analytics does cut out the need for the Connections hub, which would allow rules and routing to be defined to different OCI services which functionally can help such as directing log events to PagerDuty.
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.