Docker Archives - SpinningOps

Code

1. VS Code is one of the popular code editors and it is my preferred code editor, it has many plugins and you can customize it to your preferences

2. Python is the easiest and most robust coding tool for cloud admins, with plugin support to almost any cloud.
no need for introduction here

3. boto3 is specific for AWS but still worth mentioning if you’re using AWS as your cloud.
it have a very good documentation and does the job, it’s very important when you integrate automation with your projects.

Servers

4. Docker is by far the fastest way to install something, it’s just docker run image-name and the app is installed, although it’s not recommended for production it is suitable for IT servers, just remember to backup the volumes.

5. OpenVpn is a great tool to encrypt the connection to your servers, it can also save some public IP addresses since you connect to the server’s private IP addresses.

6. Sensu is great to know what’s up with your servers, get the metric you want to know and get alerts for something you need to know

7. Puppet is your preferred option if you don’t use Docker in your servers, it can configure your servers and maintain a state for your servers, easy to use and plenty of modules to choose from.

Misc

8. Zsh is better then the default terminal consoles and is can be used in your laptop and in your servers, install it on your servers as well to get the experience you get on your laptop.

9. Let’s Encrypt made it so easy to secure your public connections to your apps, there’s is really no reason why not to use it for your apps.

10. KeePass is a password manager that you need because you connect to many servers and services and it’s a great tool for this task, just remember to backup KeePass database.

Monitor your servers is highly important to ensure that the service you offer is accessible to customers, so you need a monitoring tool, but which one you choose? in this blog post, we’ll talk about Sensu.

What is Sensu?

Sensu is a monitoring tool and observability pipeline that enable Monitoring-as-Code

What does Monitoring-as-Code mean?

With Monitoring-as-Code you can manage your monitoring the same way you manage your code, for example, keep versions of monitoring configuration pipelines and commit them to a code repository, etc.

What does observability mean in this context?

Sensu handles the discovery of new compute instances and containers like Docker and starts monitoring them.

How to install Sensu?

Let’s install Sensu using Docker

sudo docker network create sensu
sudo docker volume create sensu-backend-data

Start the Sensu backend

sudo docker run -v sensu-backend-data:/var/lib/sensu \
-d --name sensu-backend \
--rm --network sensu -p 3000:3000 -p 8080:8080 -p 8081:8081 \
-e SENSU_BACKEND_CLUSTER_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin \
-e SENSU_BACKEND_CLUSTER_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin \
sensu/sensu:latest \
sensu-backend start --state-dir /var/lib/sensu/sensu-backend --log-level debug

How to install Sensu Agent?

Again let’s use Docker

sudo docker run -d --rm --network sensu -p :3030 \
  sensu/sensu sensu-agent start \
  --backend-url ws://sensu-backend:8081 --deregister \
  --keepalive-interval=5 --keepalive-warning-timeout=10 --subscriptions linux

After the install of the Sensu agent, the agent registers itself to the Sensu platform and subscribes to the configured topic, and starts collecting metrics.

In this case the metric is keepalive

How to log in to the Sensu dashboard?

Browse to http://127.0.0.1:3000/dashboard

Sensu Subscriptions

Sensu backends “publish” service-based monitoring topics
Sensu agents “subscribe” to service-based monitoring topics
All monitoring configurations are managed via the control plane (Sensu backend REST API)
Sensu agents can be deployed at scale with minimal configuration

For more information go to Sensu website and Sensu Docs

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