Komiser – AWS Environment Inspector

Komiser is a really nice tool that provides an overview of your Amazon AWS setup. After a super simple install, you’ll have a web console which visualizes your AWS regions and the resources you run in them. It’s great for getting a quick overview, as well as for some analyses of billing, security and utilization issues.

Zabbix in the Munich subway

Zabbix blog shares a very inspiring post “Zabbix in the subway. Munich Transport Corporation Case Study“, which shows how Zabbix is used for the monitoring of the trains and trams in Munich. Here are some implementation details to get you started:

Currently, there are 3796 devices monitored by the Zabbix server, which in turn houses the MySQL database and the web front-end. This server is operated virtually with 8 CPU’s and 32GB RAM supported by SAS storage system. 105818 items are queried by the Zabbix server from those devices, where 23820 triggers detect whether certain items deviate from their target state. This results in 298.48 NVPS with an average of approx. 7 people (actively) using the system concurrently. General overview:
* Each device inside a tram/subway is treated as a host and is monitored for availability.
* Each tram/subway is managed as a host group.
* Host groups are nested and organized by the tram/subway lines (using the host group nesting feature introduced in Zabbix 3.2).
* All devices depend on the connectivity of the MRCU (Mobile Radio Control Unit in subways) or LTE router (LTE G4 Connectivity in trams)
* Maps are automatically created for each tram/subway (using the Zabbix API).
* Maps use sub-maps to link to a specific tram/subway view.

There’s also a video from the Zabbix conference, presenting the case study.

Zabbix 4.2 is out!

Zabbix 4.2 has been released and it brings an impressive array of new features and improvements. Some of these are:

  • Built-in support of Prometheus data collection
  • Efficient high-frequency monitoring
  • Validation of collected data and error handling
  • Preprocessing data with JavaScript
  • Test preprocessing rules from UI
  • Test media type from Web UI
  • Support of TimescaleDB
  • Simplified tag management
  • More flexible auto-registration
  • Support for HTML emails
  • Animations and easy external services access on network maps
  • Extracting data from HTTP headers (like authentication tokens)
  • Non-destructive resizing and reordering of dashboard widgets
  • … and a lot more

If you were waiting for a good reason to upgrade – this is it!

Logging best practices

Logging, I think, is one of the least debated subjects in the software development. Everyone does it at least to some degree. Everyone agrees that good logs are important. But beyond that, there’s enough debate on what are the best practices, tools, and options. We need more of blog posts like this one and slides like these.

12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business

12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business” lists a bunch of services that are useful for the monitoring of your API.  Read the whole thing for more details.  Here’s the list of the services covered: