Restriction on custom logging for OCI always free

26 Wednesday May 2021

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud, General, Oracle, Technology

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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

Posted by mp3monster in General, Podcasts

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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 …