Ops Happiness - Events and Monitoring Supercharging your Operational Intelligence

In the pursuit of Ops Happiness...

(Written with guest author: Miguel Perez Colino, Senior Product Manger, Integrated Solutions Business Unit, Red Hat)


Previously in The Quest for Operations Intelligence, the focus was placed on what can be delivered with log aggregation and how to improve it. A conclusion was that to have full situational awareness on IT, you would need logs, metrics, configuration and events information correlated for easy one stop analysis when problems arise.

While we talked about logs, metrics and configuration in depth, we left events at the time without any sort of definition. What are events and what can we use them for in our quest for operations happiness?

Event happiness

Those most effected by this quest are the system administrators, who are the ones on call when things go wrong in your infrastructure. When the call comes in the middle of the night, this is the moment when log aggregation and metrics can save very precious time in finding the cause of failure.

The question is, what's happened to bring the system administrator to his post in the deep dark of night?

All Things Open - AppDev in the Cloud with Monkeys

There is an interesting conference being held in October, from 23-24th in Raleigh, North Carolina.

All Things Open.

This conference targets all aspects of open technologies, but specifically they try to recruit experienced and well known speakers.

With this in mind I put forth a session on open cloud technologies, but with a twist of theme that I have been testing on various user groups and conferences. It is resonating and was even voted one of the top sessions at Codemotion Rome 2017.

With any luck, you will get the chance to experience the vision around this story and see the live demo on how developers can gain control of their cloud circus and own these monkeys.

AppDev in the Cloud - Not my circus, not my monkeys...

When faced with all the hype around Cloud, most application developers are not really all that excited. Maybe you get that feeling that it isn't your problem, just leave me to my applications.

Let me show you why, as an application developer, you can't ignore your Cloud stack anymore. We'll examine your Cloud stack anxieties and provide you with a solutions to ease you into your first private PaaS on your own local machine that you can install in just minutes.

Finally, you will be given a collection of example projects showing you how to take control of this circus and own the monkeys!

Hope to see you there!

Codemotion Rome 2017 - AppDev in the Cloud (slides)

As previously posted, I am in Rome, Italy this week for Codemotion Rome 2017.

My talk is today, but as I like to do, I start the talk with the line, "You can get these slides online right now..."

Thus this post.

For those that attended the talk, thanks for the fun, always appreciate your time.

The submission, acceptance and session abstract have been posted in the previous articles, so here are the slides.

Red Hat Summit 2017 - Get a taste of Summit with free previews

It is coming very soon....

Red Hat Summit, it's back for 2017 in Boston, MA from 2-4 May.

The agenda is online, you can search for your favorite speakers and start planning your time between sessions, keynotes, labs and more.

To tease you even more, there is a neat feature this year called Taste of Summit, where you can get free access to many of the sessions to be given in May.

Figure 1. My taste of summit preview.

Today you can register online and gain access to short, 15 min previews of session by the speakers you will meet in person at Summit.

They are giving you a teaser on the content and style you can expect, allowing you to make some early decisions on sessions you might want to see.

How To Access JBoss BRMS Internal Git Repo in a Container

The world has changed quite a bit over the last few years.

Application delivery and application development has gone from working with local installations to leveraging Cloud-based solutions and tooling.

When working on JBoss BRMS rules applications I have shared with you how to connect to the internal git repository with your external development tooling for read-write access to your projects.

After showing you how to deploy your JBoss BRMS in a container and on OpenShift Container Platform, did you notice that something was missing?

It was not yet configured to give you that all important external access to your rules projects that you created inside the container. Well, as of today you can.

Accessing BPM projects

The example project to run JBoss BRMS in a container on OpenShift Container Platform has been updated to include the proper configuration file adjustment. There are two things that need to be adjusted:

Get Started with JBoss BPM Today

Are you asking yourself the question, "I want to start designing and creating applications that leverage JBoss BPM and I’m looking for an all-in-one guide. Do you have a suggestion?"

I have just the book for you.

Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM is a book for developers, process analysts and architects who want to leverage JBoss BPM in their application development and design. No prior experience with BPM is required.

Business environments are changing faster than ever. Organizations are constantly being tested in the markets they operate in by shifting expectations of their customers, and by competitors looking to provide better value at a lower cost. BPM, at its core, is about identifying and capturing an organization’s processes, in order to create repeatable, measurable, and consistent execution of goals – to drive the business forward!

It’s about Improving efficiency and Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM teaches you the ins and outs of JBoss BPM Suite – the leading open-source product that supports rules, events and processes from design to runtime. You will learn how to implement real processes by automating tasks, designing data models, creating business rules, and managing running process.

Start learning JBoss BPM Suite from start to finish today.

Designing effective business processes with JBoss BPM

In June 2016 the Early Access Program (MEAP) started for the book Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM.

What is a MEAP?

The Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM MEAP gives you full access to read chapters as they are written, get the finished eBook as soon as it’s ready, and receive the paper book long before it's in bookstores.

You can also interact with the author, that's me, on the forums to provided feedback as the book is being written. So come on over and get started today with Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM.

The way the MEAP works is that every month or so Manning puts a new chapter online.

This week chapter 7 was made available and those already in the MEAP will have had access to start reading the chapter.

How To Access JBoss BPM Internal Git Repo in a Container

The world has changed quite a bit over the last few years.

Application delivery and application development has gone from working with local installations to leveraging Cloud-based solutions and tooling.

When working on JBoss BPM applications I have shared with you how to connect to the internal git repository with your external development tooling for read-write access to your projects.

After showing you how to deploy your JBoss BPM Suite in a container and on OpenShift Container Platform, did you notice that something was missing?

It was not yet configured to give you that all important external access to your BPM projects that you created inside the container. Well, as of today you can.

Accessing BPM projects

The example project to run JBoss BPM Suite in a container on OpenShift Container Platform has been updated to include the proper configuration file adjustment. There are two things that need to be adjusted:

How to build your own OpenShift oc client

Today there was a new release of boot2docker ISO, a base image that is used to create the base container when you want to run the OpenShift Container Platform on your local machine as a developer does.

This is usually not an issue, but today it was.

When you try to use the OpenShift command line client, known as 'oc', you started to get errors. It does not matter if you are using Linux, Windows or osX, this will hit sooner or later if you client is version 3.4.1.5 or earlier.

The problem

It also seems to be effecting users of OpenShift Origin, Minishift* and OpenShift Container Platform clusters. For example, when installing OpenShift Container Platform I would run the following command:

$ oc cluster up --image=registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose --version=v3.4.1.5 --create-machine'

Cloud Happiness - OpenShift Container Platform install on Windows, why wait?

Get OpenShift Container Platform v3.4 today!

There is no easier way to install your very own Cloud than with OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).

Last week you learned how to go from no Cloud to fully Cloud enabled with a container based application development platform in just over two minutes.

This week you can add Windows to the platforms that can be used to install this easy, 2 minute OpenShift Container Platform with fully enabled xPaaS capabilities!

If you have been following my journey through the application development phases of storytelling, you will have seen that I was an early fan of Cloud based solutions like OpenShift. This was a way to take your application development from your local resources and move them onto a remote set of resources, while continuing to work locally as you always have.

As of today I have updated  the OpenShift Container Platform Install Demo to deliver you version 3.4 to your Windows platform. It is so simple, I believe that anyone can set this up in just over two minutes. Let's take a look, as it it only a three step process: