OpenLens or Lens app

17 Monday Apr 2023

Posted by mp3monster in Cloud Native, development, General, Technology

Tags

K8s, Kubernetes, lens, OpenLens, openlens-node-pod-menu, Plugin

I wrote about how much I like the lens app K8s dashboard capability without needing to deploy K8s dashboard. Sadly recently, there has been some divergence from K8sLens being a pure open source to a licensed tool with an upstream open-source version called Open Lens (article here). It has fallen to individual contributors to maintain the open-lens binary (here) and made it available via Chocolatey and Brew. The downside is that one of the nice features of K8sLens has been removed – the ability to look at container logs. If you read the Git repo issue on this matter – you’ll see that a lot of people are not very happy about this.

If you read through all the commentary on the ticket, you’ll eventually find the following part of the post that describes how the feature can be reintroduced.

In short, if you use the extensions feature and provide the URL of the extension as @alebcay/openlens-node-pod-menu then the option will be reintroduced. The access to the extension is here:

The details …

The extension identified is detailed here.

I’m not sure why, but I did find the installation a little unstable, and needed to reinstall the plugin, restart OpenLens and reenable the plugin. But once we got past that, as you can see below the plugin delivered on its promise.

The problem with the licensing is that it doesn’t distinguish between me as an individual and using Lens for my own personal use vs. using Lens for commercial activities. The condition sets out:

ELIGIBILITY:You or your company have less than $10M in annual revenue or funding.
https://app.k8slens.dev/subscribe

Given this wording, I can’t use the licensed version, even if I was working on an open-source project and in a personal capacity, as the company I’m employed by has more than $10 million in revenue. For me, the issue is $200 per year is a lot for something I only need to use intermittently. While I get k8slens includes additional features such as Lens Security which performs vulnerability management, and Lens Teamwork, along with support, are features and services that are oriented to commercial use – these are features I don’t actually want or need. Lens Kubernetes sounds like an interesting proposition (a built-in distribution of K8s), but when many others already provide this freely – from Docker Desktop to Kind it seems rather limited in value.

We did try installing Komodor, given its claims for an always free edition. But on my Windows 11 Pro (developer early access) installation, it failed to install, as you can see:

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

JDeveloper & Copying Formatted Text

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

JDeveloper, Plugin, Pretty formatting, XSD

I’ve started to use Oracle’s JDeveloper more and more, not just because I’m working with the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) Foundation Pack but also as an XSD Editor for designing interface definitions.

I’ve spent sometime trying to find a solution that can compete with XML Spy but without the huge price tag. I’ve tried OxygenXML, Eclipse, Visual Studio among others and concluded that its very good for a free tool. Perhaps still not as good as XMLSpy – but thats the difference between an IDE and a dedicated XSD/XML tool.

JDeveloper design view- with a lot of similarities to XMLSpy in presentation

You might think, that to use JDeveloper I have to commit to using the Oracle technology stack (and the big price tag that comes with), but this isn’t the case.

Not to mention Oracle have very much caught up with the Open Source World of Maven, there is a growing library of plugins both Official and Open Source covering a plethora of things from JUnit integration to Python & Groovy language syntaxes.

One of the nice things with XMLSpy and VisualStudio is the ability to copy into other documents the pretty formatted text (colour coded syntax etc) – making schemas or code fragments easier to look at in a document. However out of the box JDeveloper doesn’t do this out of the box. But it would seem that this capability wasn’t just wanted by me, so an extension has been written Chris Hughes that solves this problem called jdev-copyashtml.


<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><xs:schemaxmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><xs:elementname="shiporder"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="orderperson"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="shipto"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="name"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="address"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="city"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="country"type="xs:string"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element><xs:elementname="item"maxOccurs="unbounded"><xs:complexType><xs:sequence><xs:elementname="title"type="xs:string"/><xs:elementname="note"type="xs:string"minOccurs="0"/><xs:elementname="quantity"type="xs:positiveInteger"/><xs:elementname="price"type="xs:decimal"/></xs:sequence></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:sequence><xs:attributename="orderid"type="xs:string"use="required"/></xs:complexType></xs:element></xs:schema>

Once downloaded go to Help –> Check for Updates and step through so you can then choose your download – as shown.

Once installed you’ll need to restart JDeveloper. To then configure to plugin to work as you want go to Tools –> Preferences… Where you should be able to find Copy As HTML/RTF in the left menu tree to get the options to configure the plugin behaviour.

If you’re going from Windows application to another then you want the Rich Text Format setting. After that rather than Ctrl+C its Ctrl+H to copy and carry the pretty formatting/colours etc.