got it somewhere on the net

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

Those people who thinks they'll become a game developed coz they hates maths.

Why do people think that programmers are a pc repair man??? this is s**t on so many levels.

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

Get enough sleep..

I'm not the owner of the image, got it in some joke group.

lol, Well shit!!

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

Elasticsearch queries are FUCKING ugly

Elasticsearch documentation is FUCKING bare-minimum.

Kibana only shows data when it FUCKING feels like it.

Elastic stack is FUCKING annoying me

Is it rare for a Programmer to be a part time gamer? 😲

Fuck this Kibana shit and give me back my old grep (or even better: ripgrep). In 2008, I used to find shit in my fucking logfiles. Now I have an ELK stack that smells like liquid shit.

milk = 1
if
(egg > 0)
{milk = 6}system.out.println("milk");

what's wrong momm ?

So I was setting up ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) all in one EC2 on AWS today for demo purposes. I had everything prepared. Elastic IP, correct security group rules, etc.

I figured I would just do quick test before writing filters and templates if I can access Kibana. So I started service for it and tried to open it with Chrome.

Timeout.

Checked config file. Compared it to documentation. Seemed good but changed some things just for sake of change. Restarted service.

Timeout.

Reverted changes I've made in config. Restarted service. Curl on localhost. It work... OK. 😐

It took me half an hour but finally I figured it out after I took my phone and opened it from there. It was working from the beginning. Stupid company network was for some reason blocking this connection. Fuck! 😡And I was restarting that poor service like crazy trying to fix something that wasn't broken.

Kibana telling me my release should f#ck off earlier this afternoon.. sigh.

Nicest part about working on my home server: being able to just blindly update.

Who cares if that breaks kibana or my plex server? I'm the only one using them.

It can be downright cathartic to just run sudo apt-get upgrade

forgot where i get this,. credits to photo owner 😎

So I've been given a task to monitor a whole lot of logs of some servers (whole university ~ 10+ departments). The technologies are diverse so I'm cramming everything into elasticsearch via logstash (and filebeat), viewing it into kibana. Any recommendations for what should be the 'useful' stuff to be viewed into dashboard? I guess:
- Overall traffic wtih respect to previous days/weeks
- Most viewed domains
- 200
- 404
- 503
- Failed logins?
- Dropped connections?
- Critical-load of systems? 90%+

If people on Reddit are called redditor, we people on devRant would be devRanter/Ranter?

my co-worker is do damn weird... he's invisible... maybe coz im not working
#wk32

Do the IT personals got any logo or insignia in general like the doctors have?

A wonderful and Amazing life of programming only a few really enjoy and experience it.

Here comes the Rant

Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.

Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.

I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.

Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.

The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..

with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire

tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either

P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Fuck Kibana and their latest update. Want to change timeframes? 5 fucking clicks to get there. Changed the query and the timerange? 'update' will only have you looking at the new timerange for the old query which is confusing as fuck if you don't realise it. So you need to click 'update' a second time.

So many times i've been staring at the wrong logs after changing correlation ID and time range just pulling out grey hairs trying to understand what the fuck is going on.

Do you people prefer a central tool to manage multiple servers? If so, what are some good opensource ones you'd recommend? is Kibana a thing? I'm a CLI purist, and I'm a little concerned about a large attack surface on something so centralized

Thanks!

I need to implement a Java HTTP proxy with a login that basically sits in front of free Kibana.

Any ideas how to build it or existing libs, code I can use?

Fml trying to keep up with kibana's changes. That shit changes its half of its http calls to use different module in minor version upgrade. Not all but half! So suddenly some of your interceptors will be like huh I don't see this call anywhere.

Is there some sort of Query Builder for ElasticSearch?

I have ELK setup and in Kibana can generate all the aggregation visualizations but now I want the data to be usable in a program so it can generate reports like who are our top users.

But the aggregation queries seem to be very verbose... not sure how anyone can generate or understand it by hand vs telling Kibana I want a chart with X and Y axes using these terms.

IDeally I'd like to have Kibana then tell me what's the actual JSON/Elastic query it used to generate that but can't seem to find something like that.

Kibana. Fuck you very much for not letting me enter my search term without reloading the page a gazillion times and throwing away everything I entered. 😡💩

Credits to owner of the image
ps ; Im not the owner

I swear, there will come a day when I stop confusing Grafana and Kibana. The two things sound too similar for their own good.

Any good recommendations on how to gather user metrics/instrumentation and visualize data?

The program is a WPF application with not internet connection so logging to file and get file is probably the only solution.

I've played a little with Serilog to file and trying to import the log into elastic search and visualize data with Kibana.

How the fuck do you use and make a fields.yml for dynamic filebeat indexes?

Aka what if i don't want all the fields?

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff