Staring Blankly at a Screen

Tech, beer, and the occassional banjo tune

Automated Monitoring Deployments with Sensu & Gitlab

Work has kept me busy lately, but one thing that I’ve been working on is a Git-centric workflow for publishing Sensu resources. It’s still a work in progress, but I figured I’d share the progress so far. I’m currently using Gitlab’s community edition in my home lab, which features the built-in CI/CD pipelines. My runners are all using their Docker executor, so all of the stages that are run are run inside containers.

Badass Monitoring, Pt 2: The 'Why'

Back it up Oh man, did I get ahead of myself in my last post. I started chatting tools, and I realize now that I really should have been talking more about why I’m using Sensu and Gremlin. But it didn’t occur to me until this past week at Monitorama. John Allspaw gave the keynote talk (Taking Human Performance Seriously) this year. While you can watch the talk here, I’ll highlight a few points here:

Badass Monitoring, Pt 1: Sensu & Gremlin

One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We’d routinely generate alerts that weren’t actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn’t trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It’s safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.

Compiling and Running Sensu Go on OS X

I’ve been messing around with compiling Sensu Go for several different platforms lately. In my last post, I got Sensu Go agents running on my Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetson Nanos. I wanted to see if I could get an agent running on OS X as well, because who doesn’t want to monitor their laptop! The Setup Similar to what I did previously (and subsequently learned a ton more about), we’ll need to compile the Sensu Go packages since they’re not currently packaged for OS X.

Compiling and Running Sensu Go on ARM

UPDATES When I originally wrote this post, I was operating under some outdated assumptions when it comes to building Sensu on arm devices. I’ll post the updates here at the beginning of the article, and you can read on to see how I’d previously set up Sensu on my Nvidia Jetson Nanos. Compiling Sensu Go As a Go novice, I didn’t fully understand the workflow for compiling Sensu for arm devices.

A minimal Sensu environment with Docker

This past week, I had the pleaseure of attending Dockercon. While I was there primarily working the Sensu booth, it occurred to me that Docker presents an ideal way to demo what Sensu does, and I can quickly get an environment up without having to go through the rigmarole that I previously did using Vagrant. Now, that’s not saying that I think one tool is better than the other, but for the purposes of quick demos, Docker is more useful to me.

Why I started using a Kanban tool for home tasks

I’ve tried quite a few to-do apps. Google Tasks, Todoist, Wunderlist, Any.do, . I’ve even tried using things like a planner, or a Bullet Journal. No app, no physical piece of paper seems to do the trick when it comes to keeping track of things I need to do. That is, until I started using a tool that could emulate a Kanban-style workflow. Let’s start with “What the heck is a Kanban board?

Resetting Minikube's IP

UPDATED I found that there is an exception to what the solution is here, namely that this only applies to VirtualBox 5.2. If you end up using Virtualbox 6.0, note that this won’t work. the longer term fix would be to downgrade your VirtualBox version. ORIGINAL POST I use minikube for a lot of quick troubleshooting and demos. I recently found myself in a situation where the IP address kept incrementing.

Monitoring My Kegerator With Sensu

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got the KegPi mostly working and being monitored with Sensu! This post is going to go over the whole kit and caboodle and is going to build on the posts of creating the kegerator and getting Sensu to run on a Raspberry Pi. The deep and dark part of this post will cover: The code to measure the temp/contact sensors (Sensu Plugin) Writing Sensu checks that will incorporate that code Exporting the data from the temp sensor to Graphite and InfluxDB for seeing temperature trends Writing the Plugins If you haven’t had a chance to read the previous post on using Sensu to monitor Raspberry Pis, I’ll give you a short blurb about Sensu.

How I Homebrew

I’ve met quite a few homebrewers over the years and have learned tons from them. One of the things I always like asking about it their setup and getting to know what they use on brew day. I figured it’s time for me to do a HIB (How I Homebrew) post and let you know what I started brewing on, and where I’ve progressed. For Starters When I first started brewing, I started on a hand-me-down Mr.

Nice. It's looking good already.