I'm starting a new blog series in which I'll be talking about various cool things or automations that I along with my team done in a month and what are my plans for next month.
Talking about January 2013, I've done following things
1.) Streamlining of environments : The big step in streamlining the environments is to change the owners of the application from root user to tomcat user & making ports of all the application consistent across environments i.e dev, qa, pt & staging. This will help me in my long term goal of introducing a server configuration tool most preferably puppet.
2.) Log Analyzer Utility : One of the major challenge that teams face is to get real time notifications of any exceptions that occur in the server logs, to overcome this problem we have written a log analyzer utility that will scan a log file backed by a meta file, this meta file have the information about who all should be notified for an exception. This utility is written in shell script and integrated with Jenkins CI server so that we can schedule the execution of this utility as per convenience, currently jenkins is executing this utility after every 15 minutes.
3.) System monitor : Off late we were facing challenge of servers getting disk out of space & when whole system goes down then only we were able to figure out the issue is due to disk space outage due to huge log files, to overcome this problem we have built a small shell utility that scans couple of folder's recursively and provide a list of top 10 files whose size is greater then a specified threshold. In our case we have set this threshold as 1 GB, also all these variables can be provided as input to this utility such as folder's to scan regular expression of files which needs to be considered the threshold value
This is what we have achieved in the month of January 2013 although these utilities seems to be but obvious and simple one but the effect they have in the productivity of the team is considerable.
Now plans for the month of February 2013, usually I choose those things which we are doing manually, this month we will be working on following things
1.) Utility which can perform automated merge if possible
2.) Utility that can automatically upload the artifacts to a central server(artifactory in our case)
3.) Integration of git common operations with Jenkins
Talking about January 2013, I've done following things
1.) Streamlining of environments : The big step in streamlining the environments is to change the owners of the application from root user to tomcat user & making ports of all the application consistent across environments i.e dev, qa, pt & staging. This will help me in my long term goal of introducing a server configuration tool most preferably puppet.
2.) Log Analyzer Utility : One of the major challenge that teams face is to get real time notifications of any exceptions that occur in the server logs, to overcome this problem we have written a log analyzer utility that will scan a log file backed by a meta file, this meta file have the information about who all should be notified for an exception. This utility is written in shell script and integrated with Jenkins CI server so that we can schedule the execution of this utility as per convenience, currently jenkins is executing this utility after every 15 minutes.
3.) System monitor : Off late we were facing challenge of servers getting disk out of space & when whole system goes down then only we were able to figure out the issue is due to disk space outage due to huge log files, to overcome this problem we have built a small shell utility that scans couple of folder's recursively and provide a list of top 10 files whose size is greater then a specified threshold. In our case we have set this threshold as 1 GB, also all these variables can be provided as input to this utility such as folder's to scan regular expression of files which needs to be considered the threshold value
This is what we have achieved in the month of January 2013 although these utilities seems to be but obvious and simple one but the effect they have in the productivity of the team is considerable.
Now plans for the month of February 2013, usually I choose those things which we are doing manually, this month we will be working on following things
1.) Utility which can perform automated merge if possible
2.) Utility that can automatically upload the artifacts to a central server(artifactory in our case)
3.) Integration of git common operations with Jenkins
Good work!!
ReplyDeleteFor system monitoring: Look at Zabbix - it is a very good tool. We are using it for all kind of monitoring of our application/database/mail servers. It has capabilities of file system monitoring, application monitoring and web monitoring and support for scripting. There is good book about it - it costs around $8.
For real time delivery of Exception messages - you can use the SMTP appender supported by log4j/slf4j. We use it for exception from certain packages.
thanks prakash, the idea behind creating these utilities is to fine tune them and control them as per our requirements for example for real time delivery of exception messages we can have different requirement for log file monitoring & different set of people looking into those exceptions
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