LogSimulator new features

03 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by mp3monster in development, FluentD, General, logsimulator, Technology

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The log simulator we’ve built and written about in the past has had a release made that lines up with the Logging In Action book (v0.1). I am now continuing to add improvements on the main line. Not best Git branching practice, but as I’m working on this solo it doesn’t represent a problem.

If you expect multi line events all you need to do, is add to the properties file a name value pair, with the name FIRSTOFMULTILINEREGEX and the value is a Java/Groovy regular expression which can be used to determine if a line in a log entry is the 1st line in a new log. Then all subsequent log lines are appended to the previous line until a line identifies as a new log entry. The log entry will be written with newline characters in the same place as the read.

In addition to this if the synthetic log events need to be set to be new line then using the ALLOWNL property to be set to true will result in any new line escape sequences (\n) to be made into proper new lines in the output.

The details are all included in the documentation in GitHub.

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Logging In Action – almost there

08 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General

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CNCF, Docker, FluentD, fluentd bit, Kubernetes, logging

We’ve got the peer review comments back on the completed 1st draft back of the book. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thanks those who have been involved as peer reviewers, particularly those involved in the previous review cycles. I hope the reviewers found it satisfying to see between iterations that their suggestions and feedback have been taken on board and where we can.

The feed back is really exciting to read. Some tweaks and refinements to do to address the suggestions made.

The work on the Kubernetes and Docker elements and the chapter which has become available on MEAP has helped round that aspect off. But importantly, the final chapters help address the wider challenges of logging, and some of the feedback positively reflects this.

To paraphrase the comments, we’ve addressed the issues of logging which don’t get the attention that they deserve. Which for me is a success.

New and coming to a screen near you soon

31 Monday May 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Books, FluentD, General, manning, Oracle, Technology

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API, FluentD, logging, Logging in Action, OCI, Oracle, OraWorld

Last night saw the final chapter of Logging in Action with Fluentd go back to my editor. The next step is that Chapter (and others I hope) will go to MEAP, so early readers not only get the final chapter, but also the raft of improvements we’ve made. Along with that, the manuscript goes for a full peers review. Once that’s back, its time for a round of edits as I address the feedback then into copy editing and Manning sign off review.

As you might have guessed, we’ve kept busy with an article in the 25th edition of OraWorld. This follows Part 1 talking about GraphQL with a look at considerations for API Security.

In addition to that we’re working on a piece around automation of OCI management activities such as setting up developers, allowing them a level of freedom to experiment without accidentally burning through all your credits by spinning up Exadata servers or 500 node Kubernetes clusters.

We might even have some time to write more about APIs and integration.

Restriction on custom logging for OCI always free

26 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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alwaysFree, logging, OCI, shape, VM

OCI Always Free compute node has a restriction that isn’t clearly documented or obvious when you go to a instantiate such compute resources. That restriction is the absence of OCI Custom logging. This is a little surprising given that this capability is based on Fluentd and the compute footprint needed by Fluentd is so small. In the following screen shot, as you can see when configuring the compute, there is no reason to believe you can’t use OCI Logging for custom logs.

*Configuration for a logging agent on the Always Free VM*

But when you go to configure the custom logging on your running compute, you can see that the feature is disabled with the message about the restriction. It would have been nice, to have the warning on the creation phase, as if I’d manually setup the VM then went to switch on OCI Logging knowing where I’d deployed my applications, I’d have wasted time in the setup.

Solution, use one of the AMD Flex or Previous Generation to minimize the footprint to your needs.

UPDATE 09th June 2021

We’ve been told that the this constraint has been addressed. In addition Oracle also introduced the new Ampere offering which allows for nodes with a form factor of upto 4 OCPU and 24GB of RAM using the new ARM chips. You can also use variations on this such as 4x 1 OCPU 6GB RAM

Unified Logging with Fluentd – Sample and more

21 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General

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book, deal of the day, excerpt, FluentD, logging, manning, quote, unified logging

Manning have made section of my book freely available. The excerpt from the first draft of my book Unified Logging with Fluentd illustrates the Fluentd take on Hello World – the extract can be found at http://mng.bz/nzm8. This is from the 1st chapter to help set the scene of how Fluentd can be configured. The following quote comes from one of the peer reviewers:

The extract includes the use of the log simulator tool – https://github.com/mp3monster/LogGenerator which takes some configuration and can either play synthetic data or replay real logs as current log events in what ever format you want to simulate – for example standard Log4J through to Apache Server logs with the relevant time separation between events.

Book Discount …

If this isnt enough temptations, then perhaps saying that on September 22: Deal of the Day book is my book Unified Logging with Fluentd. Use code dotd092220au at https://bit.ly/3mBRLK2

Loving Your Logs – bol.com podcast

09 Thursday Jul 2020

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bol, bol.com, logging, podcast, techlab

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the bol.com’s TechLab podcast on logging. I understand this is the first time that Bol have had an external participant in one of their podcasts, so feeling very honored, not to mention having enjoyed the whole recording process.

bol.com are a European etailer, with a platform based capability. It was really interesting to talk about how they have approached logging in comparison to other organizations I’ve worked with over the years.

I’d recommend checking out not just this podcast (obviously) but others as well given that the guys have been very open about their platform and their experiences.

You can listen to the podcasts from the following links:

Observability -London Oracle Developer Meetup

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by mp3monster in Dev Meetup, FluentD, General, Technology

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FluentD, Istio, Jaeger, Kiali, logging, meetup, monitoring, observability, OKE, OpenTracing, Oracle, Tracing

meetup-monitoring Last night was the London Oracle Developer Meetup’s sessions around observability. Andrei Cioaca with a focus on the use of OpenTracing as provided by Jaeger, in a standard Kubernetes deployment with Istio – realized with Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE). This was followed by my session on another pillar using logging via FluentD. Also incorporated into standard Kubernetes, but also able to support traditional monolithic use cases.

@andreicioaca starts talking about Oracle #Kubernetes #OKE #istio and #OpenTracing at the #OracleDeveloperMeetup #London @PaaSCommunity pic.twitter.com/HISzpmxjaN

— Phil Wilkins (@PhilConsultant) September 9, 2019

Andrei provided a great overview of the 3 pillars and the strengths and weaknesses of the different pillars. With the basics covered Andrei then dove into the configuration and execution of Istio combined with Jaeger and the corresponding insights available. including a look at the kinds of visual insights that Jaeger and Kiali provide. Some probing conversations followed about the relationship to Spring Cloud Sleuth, Open Zipkin and the OpenTracing as a concept more generally.

Andrei’s presentation material can be found in his GitHub repository here.

Google Analytics on Search Terms

My session followed a pizza break, as there was a delay in its arrival. With everybody having chatted over pizza about OpenTracing, we picked up on FluentD and the Logging aspect to Observability. FluentD, as an open-source project has been growing steadily, and actually baked into several Log Analytics products and services – as the above analytics from Google shows.

The presentation looked at the growing challenges of modern software in terms of making sense of logging. We explored the capabilities of FluentD before drilling into real-world use cases and potential deployment models.

As you’ll see from the slides we ran a couple of demos. The configuration for the demos can be found at https://github.com/mp3monster/fluentd-demos along with an example payload.

The next meetup we have organized is around Blockchain, all the details can be found at https://www.meetup.com/Oracle-Developer-Meetup-London/events/264661742/.

Other related info …