Month: November 2018

#OSMC 2018 – Day 2

Posted on by Tarus

Despite how long the Tuesday night festivities lasted, quite a few people managed to make the first presentation on Wednesday morning. I’m old so I had gone to bed fairly early and was able to see “Make IT Monitoring Ready for Cloud-native Systems” bright and early.

OSMC 2018 RealOpInsight

This presentation focused on a project called RealOpInsight. This seems to be a sort of “Manager of Managers” for multiple monitoring applications, and I didn’t really see a “cloud-native” focus in the presentation. It is open-source so if you find yourself running many instances of disparate monitoring platforms you may find RealOpInsight useful.

This was followed by a presentation from Uber.

OSMC 2018 Uber

One can imagine the number of metrics an organization like Uber collects (and I did refrain myself from making snarky comments like “what database do you use to track celebrities?” and “where do you count the number of assaults by Uber drivers?”). Rob Skillington seemed pretty cool and I didn’t want to put him on the spot.

Uber used to use Cassandra, which is a storage option for OpenNMS, but they found when they hit around 80,000 metrics per second the system couldn’t keep up (one of the largest OpenNMS deployments is 20,000 metrics/sec so 80K is a lot). Their answer was to create a new storage system called M3DB. While it seems pretty impressive, I did ask some questions about how mature it was because at OpenNMS we are always looking out for ways to make things easier for our users, and Rob admitted that while it works well for Uber it needs some work to be generally useful, which is why they open-sourced it. We’ll keep an eye on it.

The next time slot was the “German only” one I mentioned in my last post, so I engaged in the hallway track until lunch.

OSMC 2018 Rihards Olups

It was lovely to see Rihards Olups again. We met at the first OSMC I attended when he was part of the “Latvian Army” at Zabbix. He gave an entertaining talk on dealing with the alerts from your monitoring system, and he ended with the tag line “Make Alerts Meaningful Again (MAMA)”. Seems like a perfect slogan for a ball cap, preferably in red.

OSMC 2018 Dave Kempe

Another delightful human being I got to see was Dave Kempe, who came all the way from Sydney. While we had met at a prior OSMC, this conference we ended up spending a lot more time together (he was in the Prometheus training as well as the Thursday Hackathon). He gave a talk on being a monitoring consultant, and it was interesting to compare his experiences with my own (they were similar).

For most people the conference ended on Wednesday. I said goodbye to people like Peter Eckel and looked forward to the next OSMC so I could see them again.

Speaking of the next OSMC, we are going to be doing OpenNMS training on that first day, November 4th, so save the date. It is the least we could do since they went to the trouble to advertise OpenNMS Horizon® on all their posters (grin).

OSMC 2018 Horizon

Ronny and I were hanging around for the Hackathon on Thursday, and for those attendees there was a nice dinner at a local restaurant called Tapasitos. It was fun to spend more time with the OSMC gang and to get ready for our last day at the conference.

OSMC 2018 Tapasitos

#OSMC 2018 – Day 1

Posted on by Tarus

The 2018 Open Source Monitoring Conference officially got started on Tuesday. This was my fifth OSMC (based on the number of stars on my badge), although I am happy to have been at the very first OSMC conference with that name.

As usual our host and Master of Ceremonies Bernd Erk started off the festivities.

OSMC 2018 Welcome

This year there were three tracks of talks. Usually there are two, and I’m not sure how I feel about more tracks. Recently I have been attending Network Operator Group (NOG) meetings and they are usually one or two days long but only one track. I like that, as I get exposed to things I normally wouldn’t. One of my favorite open source conferences All Things Open has gotten so large that it is unpleasant to navigate the schedule.

In the case of the OSMC, having three tracks was okay, but I still liked the two track format better. One presentation was always in English, although one of the first things Bernd mentioned in his welcome was that Mike Julian was unable to make it for his talk on Wednesday and thus that time slot only had two German language talks.

If they seem interesting I’ll sit in on the German talks, especially if Ronny is there to translate. I am very interested in open source home automation (well, more on the monitoring side than, say, turning lights on and off) so I went to the OpenHAB talk by Marianne Spiller.

OSMC 2018 OpenHAB

I found out that there are mainly two camps in this space: OpenHAB and Home Assistant. The former is in Java which seems to invoke some Java hate, but since I was going to use OpenHAB for our MQTT Hackathon on Thursday I thought I would listen in.

OSMC 2018 Custom MIB

I also went to a talk on using a Python library for instrumenting your own SNMP MIB by Pieter Hollants. We have a drink vending machine that I monitor with OpenNMS. Currently I just output the values to a text file and scrape them via HTTP, but I’d like to propose a formal MIB structure and implement it via SNMP. Pieter’s work looks promising and now I just have to find time to play with it.

Just after lunch I got a call that my luggage had arrived at the hotel. Just in time because otherwise I was going to have to do my talk in the Icinga shirt Bernd gave me. Can’t have that (grin).

My talk was lightly attended, but the people who did come seemed to enjoy it. It was one of the better presentations I’ve created lately, and the first comment was that the talk was much better than the title suggested. I was trying to be funny when I used “OpenNMS Geschäftsbericht” (OpenNMS Annual Report) in my submission. It’s funny because I speak very little German, although it was accurate since I was there to present on all of the cool stuff that has happened with OpenNMS in the past year. It was recorded so I’ll post a link once the videos are available.

In contrast, Bernd’s talk on the current state of Icinga was standing room only.

OSMC 2018 State of Icinga

The OSMC has its roots in Nagios and its fork Icinga, and most people who come to the OSMC are there for Icinga information. It is easy to why this talk was so popular (even though it was basically “Icinga Geschäftsbericht” – sniff). The cool demo was an integration Bernd did using IBM’s Node-RED, Telegram and an Apple Watch, but unfortunately it didn’t work. I’m hoping we can work up an Apple Watch/OpenNMS integration by next year’s conference (should be possible to add hooks to the Watch from the iOS version of Compass).

The evening event was held at a place called Loftwerk. It was some distance from the conference so a number of buses were chartered to take us there. It was fun if a bit loud.

OSMC 2018 Loftwerk

OSMC celebrations are known to last into the night. The bar across the street from the conference hotel (which I believe has changed hands at least three times in the lifetime of the OSMC) becomes “Checkpoint Jenny” once the main party ends and can go on until nearly dawn, which is why I like to speak on the first day.

#OSMC 2018 – Day 0: Prometheus Training

Posted on by Tarus

To most people, monitoring is not exciting, but it seems lately that the most exciting thing in monitoring is the Prometheus project. As a project endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Prometheus is getting a lot of attention, especially in the realm of cloud applications and things like monitoring Kubernetes.

At this year’s Open Source Monitoring Conference they offered a one day training course, so I decided to take it to see what all the fuss was about. I apologize in advance that a lot of this post will be comparing Prometheus to OpenNMS, but in case you haven’t guessed I’m biased (and a bit jealous of all the attention Prometheus is getting).

The class was taught by Julien Pivotto who is both a Prometheus user and a decent instructor. The environment consisted of 15 students with laptops set up on a private network to give us something to monitor.

Prometheus is written in Go (I’m never sure if I should call it “Go” or if I need to say “Golang”) which makes it compact and fast. We installed it on our systems by downloading a tarball and simply executing the application.

Like most applications written in the last decade, the user interface is accessed via a browser. The first thing you notice is that the UI is incredibly minimal. At OpenNMS we get a lot of criticism of our UI, but the Prometheus interface is one step above the Google home page. The main use of the web page is for querying collected metrics, and a lot of the configuration is done by editing YAML files from the command line.

Once Prometheus was installed and running, the first thing we looked at was monitoring Prometheus itself. There is no real magic here. Metrics are exposed via a web page that simply lists the variables available and their values. The application will collect all of the values it finds and store them in a time series database called simply the TSDB.

The idea of exposing metrics on a web page is not new. Over a decade ago we at OpenNMS were approached by a company that wanted us to help them create an SNMP agent for their application. We asked them why they needed SNMP and found they just wanted to expose various metrics about their app to monitor its performance. Since it ran on Linux system with an embedded web server, we suggested that they just write the values to a file, put that in the webroot, and we would use the HTTP Collector to retrieve and store them.

The main difference between that method and Prometheus is that the latter expects the data to be presented in a particular format, whereas the OpenNMS method was more free-form. Prometheus will also collect all values presented without extra configuration, whereas you’ll need to define the values of interest within OpenNMS.

In Prometheus there is no real auto-discovery of devices. You edit a file in which you create a “job”, in our case the job was called “Prometheus”, and then you add “targets” based on IP address and port. As we learned in the class, for each different source of metrics there is usually a custom port. Prometheus stats are on port 9100, node data is exposed on 9090 via the node_exporter, etc. When there is an issue, this can be reflected in the status of the job. For example, if we added all 15 Prometheus instances to the job “Prometheus” and one of them went down, then the job itself would show as degraded.

After we got Prometheus running, we installed Grafana to make it easier to display the metrics that Prometheus was capturing. This is a common practice these days and a good move since more and more people are becoming familiar it. OpenNMS was the first third-party datasource created for Grafana, and the Helm application brings bidirectional functionality for managing OpenNMS alarms and displaying collected data.

After that we explored various “components” for Prometheus. While a number of applications are exposing their data in a format that Prometheus can consume, there are also other components that can be installed, such as the node_exporter which displays server-related metrics and to provide data that isn’t otherwise natively available.

The rest of the class was spent extending the application and playing with various use cases. You can “alertmanager” to trigger various actions based on the status of metrics within the system.

One thing I wish we could have covered was the “push” aspect of Prometheus. Modern monitoring is moving from a “pull” model (i.e. SNMP) to a “push” model where applications simply stream data into the monitoring system. OpenNMS supports this type of monitoring through the telemetryd feature, and it would be interesting to see if we could become a sink for the Prometheus push format.

Overall I enjoyed the class but I fail to see what all the fuss is about. It’s nice that developers are exposing their data via specially formatted web pages, but OpenNMS has had the ability to collect data from web pages for over a decade, and I’m eager to see if I can get the XML/JSON collector to work with the native format of Prometheus. Please don’t hate on me if you really like Prometheus – it is 100% open source and if it works for you then great – but for something to manage your entire network (including physical servers and especially networking equipment like routers and switches) you will probably need to use something else.

[Note: Julien reached out to me and asked that I mention the SNMP_Exporter which is how Prometheus gathers data from devices like routers and switches. It works well for them and they are actively using it.]

#OSMC 2018 – Day -1

Posted on by Tarus

The annual Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) held in Nürnberg, Germany each year brings together pretty much everyone who is anyone in the free and open source monitoring space. I really look forward to attending, and so do a number of other people at OpenNMS, but this year I won the privilege, so go me.

The conference is a lot of fun, which must be the reason for the hell trip to get here this year. Karma must be trying to bring things into balance.

As an American Airlines frequent flier whose home airport is RDU, most of my trips to Europe involve Heathrow airport (American has a direct flight from RDU to LHR that I’ve taken more times than I can count).

I hate that airport with the core of my being, and try to avoid it whenever possible. While I could have taken a flight from LHR directly to Nürnberg on British Airways, I decided to fly to Philadelphia and take a direct American flight to Munich. It is just about two hours by train from MUC to Nürnberg Hbf and I like trains, so combine that with getting to skip LHR and it is a win/win.

But it was not to be.

I got to the airport and watched as my flight to PHL got delayed further and further. Chris, at the Admiral’s Club desk, was able to re-route me, but that meant a flight through Heathrow (sigh). Also, the Heathrow flight left five hours later than my flight to Philadelphia, and I ended up waiting it out at the airport (Andrea had dropped me off and I didn’t want to ask her to drive all the way back to get me just for a couple of hours).

Because of the length of this trip I had to check a bag, and I had a lot of trepidation that my bag would not be re-routed properly. Chris even mentioned that American had actually put it on the Philadelphia flight but he had managed to get it removed and put on the England flight, and American’s website showed it loaded on the plane.

That also turns out to be the last record American has on my bag, at least on the website I can access.

American Tracking Website

The fight to London was uneventful. American planes tend to land at Terminal 3 and most other British Airways planes take off from Terminal 5, so you have to make your way down a series a long corridors and take a bus to the other terminal. Then you have to go through security, which is usually when my problems begin.

I wear contact lenses, and since my eyes tend to react negatively to the preservatives found in saline solution I use a special, preservative-free brand of saline. Unfortunately, it is only available in 118ml bottles. As most frequent fliers know, the limit for the size of liquid containers for carry on baggage is 100ml, although the security people rarely notice the difference. When they do I usually just explain that I need it for my eyes and I’m allowed to bring it with me. That is, everywhere except Heathrow airport. Due to the preservative-free nature of the saline I can’t move it to another container for fear of contamination.

Back in 2011 was the first time that my saline was ever confiscated at Heathrow. Since then I’ve carried a doctor’s note stating that it is “medically necessary” but once even then I had it confiscated a few years later at LHR because the screener didn’t like the fact that my note was almost a year old. That said, many times have I gone through that airport with no one noticing the slightly larger size of my saline bottle, but on this trip it was not to be.

When your carry on items get tagged for screening at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, you kind of wait in a little mob of people for the one person to methodically go through your stuff. Since I had several hours between flights it was no big deal for me, but it is still very annoying. Of course when the screener got to my items he was all excited that he had stopped the terrorist plot of the century by discovering my saline bottle was 18ml over the limit, and he truly seemed disappointed when I produced my doctor’s note, freshly updated as of August of this year.

Screeners at Heathrow are not imbued with much decision making ability, so he literally had to take my note and bottle to a supervisor to get it approved. I was then allowed to take it with me, but I couldn’t help thinking that the terrorists had won.

The rest of my stay at the world’s worst airport was without incident, and I squeezed into my window seat on the completely full A319 to head to Munich.

One we landed I breezed through immigration (Germans run their airports a bit more efficiently than the British) and waited for my bag. And waited. And waited.

When I realized it wouldn’t be arriving with me, I went to look for a BA representative. The sign said to find them at the “Lost and Found” kiosk, but the only two kiosks in the rather small baggage area were not staffed. I eventually left the baggage area and made my way to the main BA desk, where I managed to meet Norbert. After another 15 minutes or so, Norbert brought me a form to fill out and promised that I would receive an e-mail and a text message with a “file number” to track the status of my bag.

I then found the S-Bahn train which would take me to the Munich Hauptbahnhof where I would get my next train to Nürnberg.

I had made a reservation for the train to insure I had a seat, but of course that was on the 09:55 train which I would have taken had I been on the PHL flight. I changed that to a 15:00 train when I was rerouted, and apparently one change is all you get with Deutsche Bahn, but Ronny had suggested I buy a “flexpreis” ticket so I could take any train from Munich to Nürnberg that I wanted. I saw there were a number of “Inter-City Express (ICE)” trains available, so I figured I would just hop on the first one I found.

When I got to the station I saw that a train was leaving from Platform (Gleis) 20 at 15:28. It was now 15:30 so I ran and boarded just before it pulled out of the station.

It was the wrong train.

Well, not exactly. There are a number of types of trains you can take. The fastest are the ICE trains that run non-stop between major cities, but there are also “Inter-City (IC)” trains that make more stops. I had managed to get on a “Regional Bahn (RB)” train which makes many, many stops, turning my one hour trip into three.

(sigh)

The man who took my ticket was sympathetic, and told me to get off at Ingolstadt and switch to an ICE train. I was chatting on Mattermost with Ronny most of this time, and he was able to verify the proper train and platform I needed to take. That train was packed, but I ended up sitting with some lovely people who didn’t mind chatting with me in English (I so love visiting Germany for this reason).

So, about seven hours later than I had planned I arrived at my hotel, still sans luggage. After getting something to eat I started the long process of trying to locate my bag.

I started on Twitter. Both the people at American and British Airways asked me to DM them. The AA folks said I needed to talk with the BA folks and the BA folks still have yet to reply to me. Seriously BA, don’t reach out to me if you don’t plan to do anything. It sets up expectations you apparently can’t meet.

Speaking of not doing anything, my main issue was that I need a “file reference” in order to track my lost bag, but despite Norbert’s promise I never received a text or e-mail with that information. I ended up calling American, and the woman there was able to tell me that she showed the bag was in the hands of BA at LHR. That was at least a start, so she transferred me to BA customer support, who in turn transferred me to BA delayed baggage, who told me I needed to contact American.

(sigh)

As calmly as I could, I reiterated that I started there, and then the BA agent suggested I visit a particular website and complete a form (similar to the one I did for Norbert I assume) to get my “file reference”. After making sure I had the right URL I ended the call and started the process.

I hit the first snag when trying to enter in my tag number. As you can see from the screenshot above, my tag number starts with “600” and is ten digits long. The website expected a tag number that started with “BA” followed by six digits, so my AA tag was not going to work.

BA Tracking Website - wrong number

But at least this website had a different number to call, so I called it and explained my situation once again. This agent told me that I should have a different tag number, and after looking around my ticket I did find one in the format they were after, except starting with “AA” instead of “BA”. Of course, when I entered that in I got an error.

BA Tracking Website - error

After I explained that to the agent I remained on the phone for about 30 minutes until he was able to, finally, give me a file reference number. At this point I was very tired, so I wrote it down and figured I would call it a night and go to sleep.

But I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to enter that number into the BA delayed bag website. It said it was invalid.

(sigh)

Then I got a hint of inspiration and decided to enter in my first name as my last, and voila! I had a missing bag record.

BA Tracking Website - missing bag

That site said they had found my bag (the agent on the phone had told me it was being “traced”) and it also asked me to enter in some more information about it, such as the brand of the manufacturer.

BA Tracking Website - information required

Of course when I tried to do that, I got an error.

BA Tracking Website - system error

Way to go there, British Airways.

Anyway, at that point I could sleep. As I write this the next morning nothing has been updated since 18:31 last night, but I hold out hope that my bag will arrive today. I travel a lot so I have a change a clothes with me along with all the toiletries I need to not offend the other conference attendees (well, at least with my hygiene), but I can’t help but be soured on the whole experience.

This year I have spent nearly US$20,000 with American Airlines (they track that for me on their website). I paid them for this ticket and they really could have been more helpful instead of just washing their hands and pointing their fingers at BA. British Airways used to be one of the best airlines on the planet, but lately they seemed to have turned into Ryanair but without that airline’s level of service. The security breach that exposed the personal information of their customers, stories like this recent issue with a flight from Orlando, and my own experience this trip have really put me off flying them ever again.

Just a hint BA – from a customer service perspective – when it comes to finding a missing bag all we really want (well, besides the bag) is for someone to tell us they know where it is and when we can expect to get it. The fact that I had to spend several hours after a long trip to get something approximating that information is a failure on your part, and you will lose some if not all of my future business because of it.

I also made the decision to further curtail my travel in 2019, because frankly I’m getting too old for this crap.

So, I’m now off to shower and to get into my last set of clean clothes. Here’s hoping my bag arrives today so I can relax and enjoy the magic that is the OSMC.