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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tag Archives: logging

LogSimulator New Feature – Custom Targets with OCI Logging example

14 Friday Oct 2022

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, development, General, logsimulator, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

book, loggenerator, logging, logsimulator, OCI, Prometheus

Those who have been using my Logging in Action book will know that to help test the configuration of monitoring tools including Fluentd we have built a LogGenerator that can very easily play and replay logging events into a variety of destinations and formats. all written in Groovy to make the utility easy to run as a script and extend without needing to set up a proper Java development environment.

With the number of different destinations built into the script and the logic to load the source log events and format them the utility is getting rather large for a single file. Rather than letting it continue to grow as we add more destinations to pump log events too, I’ve extended the implementation so you can point to a Groovy file that implements the logic to send the log events. It only requires three simple methods to be implemented.

To demonstrate the feature we have created a custom extension and fully documented it. The extension allows you to send log events to the OCI Logging service. This includes an optional crude aggregation mechanism as sending individual log events is a little inefficient over REST. By doing this we can send synthetic or playback logs as if we’re an application in real-life to ensure that any alerting or routing for the logging works properly before we get anywhere production and do not need to run the application and induce error events.

Beyond this, we’re also thinking about creating a plugin to fire log events at Prometheus so we can send events using the Prometheus pushgateway. As a result, we can tune Prometheus’ configuration.

More improvements – refactoring the existing code

We will refactor the existing code to use the same approach which should make the code more maintainable, but the changes won’t stop the utility from working as it always has (so we won’t break out the existing output channels from the core).

We have also started to improve the code commenting – so hopefully it will make the code a bit more navigable.

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Is The 12 Factor App right about Logging?

05 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by mp3monster in development, Fluentd, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

12 Factor, 12 Factor App, conference, development, Grafana, JAX, logging, London, OpenSearch, Prometheus, Splunk, stdout

The 12 Factor App definition is now ten years old.  In the world of software that is a long time. So perhaps it’s time to revisit and review what it says.  As I have spent a lot of time around Logging – I’ve focussed on Factor 11 – Logging.

I have been fortunate enough to present at the hybrid JAX London conference on this subject. It was great to get out and see people at a conference rather than just with a screen and a chat console of online-only events.

You can see my presentation here:

Continue reading →

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Avoid creating an event storm when using social outputs with Fluentd

14 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by mp3monster in Fluentd, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Fluentd, logging, mail storm, monitoring, Plugin, social, supress

Fluentd has an incredible catalogue of plugins including notification and collaboration channels from good old-fashioned email through to slack, teams, and others.

The thing to remember if you use these channels is that if you’re sending errors, from application logs it isn’t unusual for there to be multiple error events as a root event can cause a cascade of related issues. For example, if your code is writing transactions to a database and the database goes down with no failover mechanism, then your code will most likely experience an error, roll back the transaction perhaps to some sort of queue, and then try to process the next event. Which will again fail. This is the classic situation where multiple errors will get reported for the same issue. This problem is often referred to as a mail storm given that there was a time when we didn’t have social collaboration tools and everyone used email.

There are several ways to overcome this problem. But the most simple and elegant of these is using the suppress plugin in its filter mode.

<filter **>
  @type suppress
  interval 60       # period in seconds when the condition to supress is triggered
  num 2             # number of occurences of a value before suppressing
  attr_keys source  # the element of the event to consider.
</filter>

In this example if we encounter an event with an attribute called source containing the same value twice then the suppression will kick in for 60 seconds. If you want the key to the valuebeing checked to be the tag then simply omit the attr_keys parameter.

Of course, we don’t want the suppression to kick in if the same value in the attribute keys occured once every few hours. To address this the occurence count is applied over not a time period, but a number of events received by the configuration of max_slot_num which defaults to 10k, but resets

In the filter mode, this plugin is best positionbed immediately before the match block. This means we don’t accidentally suppress messages before they are routed anywhere else.

For the purposes of a demo this is less of an issue. But for a realworld use case would probably benefit from some tuning. All the documentation for this plugin is at https://github.com/fujiwara/fluent-plugin-suppress

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Logging in Action – has gone to the printers!

07 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Fluentd, General, manning, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, book, logging, Logging in Action, manning, print, Waterstones

The final leg of getting the book published has taken a lot longer than had been expected. But we’ve just been told that the book has been sent to the printers. This means:

  • final eBook will be available from Manning in about 1 week
  • Preordered print copies of the book will be dispatched in about 2 weeks
  • The alternative ebook formats for mobile readers e.g. kindle etc available in about 3 weeks
  • The book will become available to purchase from other book stores such as
    Amazon in 3-4 weeks
  • Safari Books Online and Apple stores will have the ebook in 4-5 weeks

Here are some links for buying the book …

  • Manning
  • Amazon UK – Amazon US – Amazon DE – Amazon Fr
  • Barnes & Noble, Waterstones
  • Safari Online Books

It also means the project from a writing perspective is complete. But we’re starting to look at the additional examples we’ll add to the GitHub repo. These will be dependent upon the book.

The complete cover artworks …

We’ve got print books now …

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LogSimulator new features

03 Friday Sep 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Log, logging, tool, utility

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.

Continue reading →

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Logging In Action – almost there

08 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, manning

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

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New and coming to a screen near you soon

31 Monday May 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

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Restriction on custom logging for OCI always free

26 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

Custom Logging Limitation

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

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Unified Logging with Fluentd – Sample and more

21 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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Loving Your Logs – bol.com podcast

09 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by mp3monster in General, Podcasts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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 TechLab

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:

  • Spotify
  • Apple
  • Direct from bol.com

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