What Are the Recommended Practices of Monitoring?

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Question
AWS’s Five Pillars of Well-Architected Framework recommend monitoring as a component of three of the pillars (operational excellence, reliability and performance efficiency).

There is no question that monitoring is important inside or outside of a public cloud. What patterns or traits might a good centralized monitoring system have (consistent with some phrase as “best practices”)?

Answer
Here are 15 characteristics of good monitoring.

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How Do You Make a Web UI Service Accessible to Outside Web Browser Traffic?

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Problem scenario
Sometimes you have a web service listening on the loop back IP address on a non-standard port.

When you run nmap -Pn localhost, you see a service is listening on a given port (e.g., 9200). When you run nmap -Pn on an internal or external IP address, you do not see a service listening on that given port. You want to direct traffic to this listening service (e.g.,

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What is a ConfigMap in Kubernetes?

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Question
What is a ConfigMap in Kubernetes?

Answer
A ConfigMap is a mapping of configuration originally in YAML format that resides in etcd (partially taken from this external posting). A .yaml file will define the version of the Kubernetes API (e.g., version 1), data, and the “kind:” key will be set to “ConfigMap”.

The content of the ConfigMap is consumed by an application in Kubernetes.

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Where Can You Find a Complete List of the Reserved Words for Declarative Pipeline Syntax?

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Problem scenario
You want to create a Jenksinfile for a pipeline. Where can you find a complete list of the reserved words for Declarative pipeline syntax?

Answer
This external page has something close. It does not go into into how “sh” works. Using “sh” you can run Linux commands. There are “bat” and “powershell” options too. Here is an example (taken from Jenkins’ website) :

pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage(‘Build’) {
steps {
sh ‘echo “Hello World”‘
sh ”’
echo “Multiline shell steps works too”
ls -lah
”’
}
}
}
} …

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What is an HPA in Kubernetes?

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Question
What is an HPA in Kubernetes?

Answer
HPA stands for HorizontalPodAutoscaler. It is a concept and resource that allows clusters to scale out upon a certain condition being met. HPA can support a pod to scale based on certain amounts of CPU utilization. It natively supports granular CPU requests down to a single millicore. A .yaml file in Kubernetes has the key “kind”;

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How Do You Use the Docker Pipeline Plugin with Jenkins?

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Problem scenario
You want to use the Docker Pipline (with the Jenkins ID of “docker-workflow”). What do you do?

Solution
Prerequisites
 Jenkins needs to be installed. If you need assistance, see this posting if you are using a CentOS/RHEL/Fedora server; if you want to install Jenkins on a Debian/Ubuntu server, see this posting.

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What is Operational Readiness in I.T.?

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Question
How would a DevOps engineer define operational readiness or what is operational readiness in I.T.?

Answer
“All things are ready, if our mind be so.” –William Shakespeare

While some people would say it is more of a state*, others may say it is more of a journey**. Operational readiness is having sufficient staff and automation to maintain the minimum level of service that the business requires for a given product or service.

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What is an Ingress Resource in Kubernetes?

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Question
What is an Ingress resource in Kubernetes?

Answer
It is a Kubernetes technique of exposing services via an individual IP address (page 135 of Kubernetes in Action by Luksa). In TCP/IP networking, the Ingress port allows inbound traffic to route somewhere. Kubernetes supports other IP address to service mapping methods (e.g., NodePort or LoadBalancer). NodePort operates on layer 4 of the OSI seven-layer model (according to this posting).

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How Do You Install Splunk in a Docker Container?

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Problem scenario
You want to run Splunk from a Docker container. What do you do?

Solution
Prerequisites
Install Docker. If you need assistance, see this posting.

Procedures
1. Run this command: docker pull splunk/splunk:latest

2. Run this command, but replace “simpleword” with the password that you want the administrator account for the web UI to have:

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -e ‘SPLUNK_START_ARGS=–accept-license’ -e ‘SPLUNK_PASSWORD=simpleword’ splunk/splunk:latest

3.

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