technical blogs Archives - Page 15 of 22

How To Setup An Agent On Azure Devops

Introduction

To set up a self-hosted agent in Azure DevOps, follow these steps: First, generate a Personal Access Token (PAT). Next, go to Organization Settings to create an agent pool. Next, download the appropriate agent package for your operating system (whether it’s Windows or Linux). Then, run the `config.cmd` or `./config.sh` command to register the agent. Be sure to install the agent in a directory that doesn’t contain spaces, such as `C:\agents`.

Azure DevOps is an integrated service provided by Azure. In recent times, it is observed that Azure DevOps is increasing its penetration into the DevOps community. Being a SaaS service, it doesn’t come with a pre-configured host or better say, an agent to execute its commands. That’s why whenever we want to use our Azure DevOps Pipeline we need to have an agent configured in our Agent Pool. In this blog, we will learn how to configure an agent and later on how to create a service for our host. Continue reading “How To Setup An Agent On Azure Devops”

How to Setup Consul through the OSM Ansible Role

Are you searching for service discovery or a service mesh tool for a distributed environment?

Did you find any with easy installation? Not yet!! Think fast….It’s just a piece of cake.YES! NO! Calm down because I got it !!!!

A few days back we got a requirement where we had to setup multiple services on multiple servers and in a cluster mode….So now the question arises how will the services be auto discovered? how will we get to know the health check of the service? and above all how to restrict users on different services. After a lot of research, I came across a tool named as consul. But now another stumbling block arises HOW TO SETUP IT?

Your answer might be just go ahead and download the binary on every server, if that’s what you’re thinking…then STOP! Because doing it manually on plenty of servers is time-consuming and also not an efficient way. So, I thought of using a configuration management tool that is none other than ansible. Then there were roles that were already present in the market but some have the hard coded encryption key, some were not generating the bootstrap token and also they were not easy to understand. None of the roles fulfilled the requirement.

So, I thought of creating an ansible role with features like, enabling ACL and generating a bootstrap token, and an encryption key with easy-to-understand language.

In this blog, I have explained the OT-OSM consul ansible role.

Without any delay let’s get started!!!

Now you might be thinking what is consul?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Integrate Azure Active Directory with Redash SAML [ SSO ]

Redash is a very popular data analytics tool that is used to visualize, explore, and query data from multiple data sources. It also provides SAML based authentication option which can be used to set up Single Sign-in [SSO] with different kinds of SAML based options. It gives flexibility to Setup SAML Based Authentication Redash because unlike Azure Active directory, there are lots of software tools that support and provide SAML support. Azure active directory also provides Azure AD SAML Toolkit option, which organizations can utilize to create SAML based authentication with Redash.

Azure Active Directory Setup

Step 1: Click on the Left top bar to get a List of options provided by Microsoft Azure.

Step 2: Click on Azure Active Directory

Step 3: Once you get all the options, Under the Manage section, you will see Enterprise applications, Click on Enterprise applications

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.