All things Software related
Are you a professional Data Analyst? Do you casually browse through data? Neither? There is a common ask of analysis tools and solutions that they be powerful enough to be useful, yet simple enough that novices can use. What does that really mean? How powerful do they need to be? How simple do they need … Read more
Move Instana microservice endpoint configurations from one Instana tenant to another.
How many dirty meetings have you attended? Meetings that shouldn’t have been meetings at all? Meetings need to have a certain cleanliness, a certain level of hygiene and etiquette to them in order to be useful. Agenda Meetings need to have a clear agenda. What is the purpose of this meeting? Who is responsible for … Read more
We assign tools a certain level of importance. Tools with high importance get their own dedicated space. Tools with low importance share space with other tools. For example, X-Ray and MRI machines are tools with very high importance, so they get their own space. We devote entire rooms to these tools. On the other hand, … Read more
When deploying the logging aggregation tool Fluentd to our Kubernetes cluster, Fluentd was failing to start up. It was failing with a permission denied error when trying to create the directory /var/log/fluent. I had Fluentd configured to write its position files in the /var/log/fluent directory. /var/log was mounted as a hostDir, from (predictably) /var/log on the host node, in order to … Read more
If you need to get log events from fluentd up to a Splunk HTTPEventCollector (HEC), I’ve found that you have two options, splunk-http-eventcollector and splunkhec. Both of these plugins have fallen out of use in the last couple of years. When using either of these plugins, you lose the milliseconds in log event times. So what? We … Read more
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get our logging to behave sensibly with all the microservices we have running in Kubernetes. Some of our apps log in JSON, some log with positional parameters, some log with a key=value, some use a mixed format, where part of the message is positional, and the rest … Read more
I think it is a bit of a shame that software developers, and technical folks in general, do not study more philosophy. It turns out that many of these old stuffy guys have thought about many of the things that we actually run into on an ongoing basis. Even the vocabulary that the ancient philosophers … Read more
We all know that architects need to make decisions. These decisions have lasting impacts, and can be in various states, such as new, in force, obsolete, etc. How do you record these decisions, and keep those records up to date? I recently read through this blog post: http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-architecture-decisions which describes what looks to me to … Read more
If you work in any kind of traditional office space, you are likely plagued by drive-by interruptions. People will constantly stop by and talk to you. Some of these conversations are fruitful, some are useless, many could be a chat or email, and all of them cause you to lose focus on what you were … Read more