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Nginx Amplify : comprehensive Nginx monitoring

Somehow I missed the announcement of the Nginx Amplify (beta) back in November of last year, so here it goes now.

Nginx Amplify is a new tool for the comprehensive monitoring of Nginx web servers. Here’s what it can do for you:

Visually identify performance bottlenecks, overloaded servers, or potential DDoS attacks

Improve and optimize NGINX performance with intelligent advice and recommendations

Get alerts when something is wrong with the delivery of your application

Plan capacity and performance for web applications

Keep track of systems running NGINX

As well

as the regular proactive monitoring of the Nginx issues. Have a look at the documentation for more details.

GitHub pricing : Business

GitHub has yet another update to their pricing options. Business plans have been launched with support for SAML single sign-on, 99.95% uptime SLA, 24×5 support with 8 hour response, and more.

Unfortunately it still counts external contributors as users in the account, which makes it too expensive for my organizations, but it’s good to see them trying.

Fixing outdated Let’s Encrypt (zope.interface error)

I’ve started using Let’s Encrypt for the SSL certificates a while back. I installed it on all the web servers, irrelevant of the need for SSL, just to have it there, when I need it (thanks to this Ansible role). One of those old web servers needed an SSL certificate recently, so I thought it’d be no problem to generate one.

But I was wrong. The letsencrypt-auto tool got outdated and was failing to execute, throwing some Python exception about missing zope.interface module. A quick Google search brought this StackOverflow discussion, with the exact issue I was having.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
    import zope.component
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

However, the solution didn’t fix the problem for me:

unset PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT
/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -v

Even pulling the updated version from the GitHub repository didn’t solve it.

After poking around for a while more, I found this bug report from the last year, which solved my problem.

I recommend:

Running rm -rf /root/.local/share/letsencrypt. This removes your installation of letsencrypt, but keeps all configuration files, certificates, logs, etc.

Make sure you have an up to date copy of letsencrypt-auto. It can be found here.

Run letsencrypt-auto again.

If you get the same behavior, you can try installing zope.interface manually by running:

/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/pip install zope.interface

Hopefully, next time I’ll remember to search my blog’s archives …

Update (May 31, 2017): check out my brother’s follow up post with even better way of fixing this issue.

Downdetector – a weatherman for the digital world

Downdetector is yet another one of those services that monitor major web services and provides and lets you see if any of them is experiencing any issues or outages.

You can search for specific providers or browse by company or issue type. There’s also a weekly top 10. What I like in particular are comments for each report, where you can get some feedback from other users experiencing the problem.

Google and HTTPS

Here are some interesting news on the subject of Google and HTTPS:

In support of our work to implement HTTPS across all of our products (https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/) we have been operating our own subordinate Certificate Authority (GIAG2), issued by a third-party. This has been a key element enabling us to more rapidly handle the SSL/TLS certificate needs of Google products.

As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology. This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority. To this end, we have established Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/), the entity we will rely on to operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and Alphabet.

The process of embedding Root Certificates into products and waiting for the associated versions of those products to be broadly deployed can take time. For this reason we have also purchased two existing Root Certificate Authorities, GlobalSign R2 and R4. These Root Certificates will enable us to begin independent certificate issuance sooner rather than later.

We intend to continue the operation of our existing GIAG2 subordinate Certificate Authority.

If you need a bit of help putting this into perspective, this Hacker News thread has your back:

You can now have a website secured by a certificate issued by a Google CA, hosted on Google web infrastructure, with a domain registered using Google Domains, resolved using Google Public DNS, going over Google Fiber, in Google Chrome on a Google Chromebook. Google has officially vertically integrated the Internet.