DEVOPS DONE RIGHT. - Page 59 of 119 - A blog site on our Real life experiences with various phases of DevOps starting from VCS, Build & Release, CI/CD, Cloud, Monitoring, Containerization.

TICK | Alert Flooding Issue and Optimization

Whenever in DevOps we discuss about monitoring and alerting systems we often come across the TICK Stack! What is a TICK stack? What is so special about it? Is it different from ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, Cloudwatch, and NewRelic? I will try to answer all of these queries briefly but my motivation for writing this blog is the Alert Flooding issue I faced while testing my TICK stack.

Note: This blog is not about the detailed working about TICK and its setup.

What is TICK ? What is special about it?

To explain TICK, it is basically a complete collection of services provided by the InfluxData community to capture, store, stream, process, and visualize data to provide us a highly available and robust solution for monitoring and alerting. TICK is an abbreviation for :

Telgeraf – It is a very light-weighted server agent for scrapping metrics from the system it runs on, also has the capability to pull the metrics from various third-party APIs like Kafka, StatsD, etc.
InfluxDB – It is known as the heart of the TICK stack and genuinely speaking it is one of the most efficient and high-performance database stores for handling high volumes of time-series data. It is open source and uses SQL-like query language.

How to fix the dpkg lock file error in Packer?

Today everyone is switching to cloud platforms. To this, we need to install basic software or modify certain Configurations in each server and to all this, we call prerequisites. So we have a concept of creating a BASE IMAGE and GOLDEN IMAGE. We were creating Golden Server Image for one of our clients using Packer to fulfill the prerequisites, and it is when I faced this issue.

‘E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock’

Firstly, we will talk about Packer.

Terraform Version Upgrade

Starting the blog with the question – What is Terraform?

It can be called a magic wand that creates Infrastructure on the basis of the code that you write.

In Hashicorp’s words, “Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as A Code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure.“

Introduction to Siege

Several factors play an important role in order to make a business succeed. One of them is its online presence in today’s world. In simple words, online presence means an informative and attractive web page. Web page/server are the mirror reflection of how successful a business is. It is crucial to have a stable web server as the performance of an application or a web server will define the user experience which will have a direct impact on business as well.

Now you must be thinking if a web page is so important, so it should be able to function efficiently when in use. The stability of a website is a matter of concern in case of an extreme situation which highlights the importance of testing the web server. By testing, we mean load testing and performance testing which will give stress to the website and tells its performance under stress.

Now you must be thinking testing will require a huge cost and effort for servers which sometimes makes us skip the testing phase. Let me help you in solving this doubt by introducing you to “Siege” which will make testing a simple and achievable task.

Cross Region Internal Load Balancing in AWS with VPC Peering

Load Balancing is a method of addressing High Availability in any Cloud deployment. Load Balancers note the health of backend resources, thereby not sending traffic to servers that are not able to fulfill requests. The main aim of load balancing is to prevent any single server from getting overloaded and possibly breaking down.

In this blog, we are talking about internal load balancing with Network Load Balancer and Application Load Balancer. Network Load Balancer automatically provides a static IP per Availability Zone (subnet) to be used by applications as the front-end IP of the Load Balancer.