Need a quick way to visualize statistics or custom metrics ?
You like nice graphs - Kibana style ?

Grafana is the answer (the presentation layer).
And InfluxDB is the assistant for the job (the database storing the metrics).

\# http://influxdb.com/docs/v0.8/introduction/installation.html  
\$ wget http://s3.amazonaws.com …

So you're managing / maintaining (from the terminal) some FTP services and you'd like to have a quick access to each and every one of them without a login ?

Here's how you do it:

\$ apt-get install curlftpfs  
\$ mkdir /root/ftp1  
\$ curlftpfs 'ftp-username':'ftp-password'@ftp-server /root/ftp1/  
\$ cd /root/ftp1/ && ls  

Note …

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host - this was the message returned when trying to connect to a server (Debian, exposed to Internet, using a non-standard port for ssh service) using a valid key. After 5+ retries i finally managed to connect.

I checked the "/var/log/auth.log" logs and …

While stress-testing a project hosted on Amazon, we've found an issue with the MySQL Server (2 CPU, 4G RAM): slow and unresponsive !
[cc lang='bash']
root@nms:\~# ab -c 10 -n 100 "http://mysql/stress.php" 2>/dev/null | grep "Time taken for tests"
Time taken for tests: 11.150 …

I've been looking for a Redis Admin UI, but it looks like there is no "standard" one.

Then I've tried Redmon and liked it because:
- easy to install
- it has a nice design
- you can run console commands
- you can change configuration

[cc lang='bash']
# debian squeeze
\$ apt-get install ruby …

So you've got your ELK setup - let's suppose you've installed all components (logstash and elasticsearch) on the same server.
Everything is looking great, but there is one "little" security problem: everybody can access it, and you don't want that :)

It's time to take action !

Secure the access to logstash-web service …

This is just an update of the Centralizing Logs post.
The solution is more mature and it's getting easier and easier to install all the components.
Elasticsearch Logstash and Kibana are now part of the ELK stack.

So here we go:
[cc lang='bash']
# java 7 required
## on debian 7 …

By default, local storage devices are disabled as potential RDM candidates on an ESXi/ESX host. To enable it, you need to perform the following set of actions (having a vm named "w7" stored on the "ds" datastore).

SSH Host
[cc lang='bash']
# get the disk you want to be …

MongoDB is a document database that provides high performance, high availability and easy scalability. This post is a simple crash course about how to install MongoDB, start it using the default configuration and some basic DBA commands. If you need a complex setup with clusters, ha, sharding, replicas ... this is …

When you write data to an LVM logical volume, the file system lays the data out across the underlying physical volumes. You can control the way the data is written to the physical volumes by creating a striped logical volume. For large sequential reads and writes, this can improve the …