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Splunk vs ELK

If you are in IT Operations in any role, you have probably come across either Splunk or ELK, or both. These are two heavyweights in the field of Operational Data Analytics. In this blog post, I’m going to share with you what I feel about these two excellent products based on my years of experience with them.

The problem Splunk and ELK are trying to solve: Log Management

While there are fancier terms such as Operational Data Intelligence, Operational Big Data Analytics and Log data analytics platform, the problem both Splunk and ELK are trying to solve is Log Management. So, what’s the challenge with Log management?

Logs, logs, logs and more logs

 

The single most important piece of troubleshooting data in any software program is the log generated by the program. If you have ever worked with vendor support for any software product, you have been inevitably asked to provide – you guessed it, Log files. Without the log files, they really can’t see what’s going on.

Logs not only contains information about how the software program runs, they may contain data that are valuable to business as well. Yeap, that’s right. For instance, you can retrieve wealth of data from your Web Server access logs to find out things like geographical dispersion of your customer base, most visited page in your website, etc.

If you are running only a couple of servers with few applications running on them, accessing and managing your logs are not a problem. But in an enterprise with hundreds and even thousands of servers and applications, this becomes an issue. Specifically,

  1. There are thousands of log files.
  2. The size of these log files run in Giga or even Terra bytes.
  3. The data in these log files may not be readily readable or searchable (unstructured data)

Sources_of_logfiles (4)

Both Splunk and ELK attempt to solve the problem of managing ever growing Log data. In essence, they supply a scalable way to collect and index log files and provide a search interface to interact with the data. In addition, they provide a way to secure the data being collected and enable users to create visualizations such as reports, dashboards and even Alerts.

Now that you know the problem Splunk and ELK are attempting to solve, let’s compare them and find how they are achieving this. I’m going to compare them in 4 areas as follows:

Technology

Cost

Features

Learning Curve for the operations team

Got it ? I can’t wait to share. Let’s dive in.

Splunk_image

VS

ElasticSearch Logo

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8 useful shortcuts for lightning fast web browsing

Let me share with you 8 super easy shortcuts to speed up your web browsing. As with any software tools, learning keyboard shortcuts can save lots of time and enables you to look like a pro in front of others 🙂

1.Bookmark a page with Ctrl D

While on the page you would like to bookmar, simply press Ctrl D to bookmark the page. You can choose a folder to save the bookmark. I like to organize my bookmarks by creating various folders.

Screen Shot 2017-11-11 at 9.36.40 PM

2.Open a new Tab using Ctrl T, close using Ctrl W and switch using Ctrl Tab

While on a page, simply press Ctrl T to open a new tab. Note that you can use Ctrl N to open a new browser window. I personally like to open tabs instead of new windows.

Screen Shot 2017-11-11 at 9.41.13 PM

To close the current tab, simply press Ctrl W.

To switch between tabs, press Ctrl Tab to jump to the tab on the right. If you need to switch to the tab on the left, simply press Ctrl Shift Tab

Note for Mac users: You have to use Ctrl key on your MAC for this shortcut (Not the Command key). On all other shortcuts, use Command key instead of Ctrl key.

3.Jump to the URL field using Ctrl L

Wherever you are on page, clicking Ctrl L takes you the URL field. You can immediately start typing the url you wnat to visit.

4.Scroll down a page using Space bar

This can be very handy if you hate scrolling down using mouse (either using a scroll wheel or using the side bar). Simply press space bar to scroll down one page. As you may have guessed, simply press Shift Spacebar to move up one page.

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So we all know that Java Heap is a crucial resource, lack of which will kill your application. Naturally you will want to monitor the heap usage. Bur surprisingly it is not very straight forward to measure the heap usage of your JVM unless you have a modern APM (Application Performance Management) tool implemented. To make things worse, in Windows world, the memory you see in Windows Task Manager (a solid tool by btw) is NOT the same as the JVM heap size.

For example, let’s say you have set maximum java heap at 3GB. But it is quite possible that the memory shown by Task Manager be higher (much higher at times), say 3.5 gb or 4 gb. You can pull you hair trying to figure out where that extra memory utilization came from, or you can read rest of this article and put an end to the mystery.

Generally speaking, here is the reason memory shown by the Task Manager is more than the Heap: The memory shown in Task manager is the entire Memory footprint of the JVM and NOT just the Java Heap of the JVM. Note that the JVM is just an another process as far as Windows is concerned.

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10 Windows Tricks every Java Developer should know

While Unix/Linux is the most popular OS for hosting enterprise java applications, there are still significant amount of applications deployed on Windows Platform. If your application is running on a Windows box, you ought to know how to get around Windows in order to support your application effectively.

In this piece, I’m going to share with you 10 tricks every Java Developer should know. I tested these in Windows 2008 R2. But it should work on most Windows flavors. Let’s get right to it.

1. Find the full command line of your java application

In Unix/Linux, if you need to see the full command line of your application, you can simply use ‘ps –ef’. For example,
ps –ef | grep <my application>
Alas! There is no ‘ps’ in windows. So, how do you do this? Say hello to Windows Task Manager.

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5 reasons why you can’t afford NOT to Virtualize

The verdict is in. Virtualization is the future. If you are still running your applications on bare metal, you are missing out on tons of benefits, or even hurting your business. Virtualization is a software tech that lets you run multiple operating systems and applications on a physical server by abstracting the hardware underneath. Among several Virtualization software makers, the following are considered leaders:

VMWare (ESXi)

Citrix (XenServer)

Microsoft (Hyper-V)

Let’s dive in to 5 reasons why you can’t afford NOT to virtualize (not necessarily in any order)

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How to use AppDynamics to monitor Server health?

Yes, AppDynamics is awesome for Application monitoring – Java Heap, deep transaction tracing, tons of out-of-the-box framework monitoring (JDBC,WebService etc) and the list goes on. But do you know Appdynamics can be used to effectively monitor Servers too, whether it is virtual or physical? When I say server, I mean the host operating system such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, Windows 2012, Solaris etc. Let me show you how you can do this.

Enter AppDynamics Machine Agent

While Java can be monitored using a Java Agent, a Server can be monitored using a special type of agent called Machine Agent. You will have to have license to run these agents (When you purchase Application agents, typically AppDyanmics throws the same number of Machine Agents, and so you should be good in terms of additional cost). If you are not sure about your present licensing situation, click on ‘licensing’ in your Controller UI as shown below.

Unlike Application agents which run inside the JVM/CLR, Machine agent is a standalone Java program that runs on the host operating system. It collects hardware metrics and sends them to Controller (once a minute). A user can view these metrics via Controller UI. Pretty simple, hah?

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Occasionally you will want to know how many lines are there in a file. In unix world, you can use the nifty ‘wc’ command

wc –l < filename>

In Windows Powershell you can use the built in cmdlet named ‘measure-object’. It is pretty powerful.

For counting lines in a file, use the following command

Get-content <filename> | Measure-Object –Line

For example

If you want to learn more about measure-object,

Help Measure-Object –detailed

Enjoy

 

How to use Sleep in Windows Powershell?

If you come from the unix world, there is a nifty command you can use to ‘sleep’ in shell scripts. What about windows powershell?

You can use the command start-sleep just like you use ‘sleep’ in unix.

You can use either seconds or milliseconds as shown below:

Enjoy

How to print web pages without annoying ads?

I am sure you have gone through this: You see an interesting article in a website and decide to print it to take a closer look. The article itself is about a page or two in length. But what happens when you go to the printer to collect it? That’s right. It prints pages and pages of data, mostly ads and even more annoying – blank pages.

With Chrome, there is a neat feature that lets you avoid those annoying ads and blank lines.

Check this out. Here is a sample page that you see online:

Now when you print this article (either using Ctrl-P or using the chrome menu to choose ‘print’, you will see the following page

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Question:

How to clear passwords from Windows Vault (Credentials Manager) ?

Answer:

At times, you want to get rid of passwords stored in Windows vault (primarily if you are in a corporate environment where you have frequently change the password).
If you keep getting locked out of your corporate environment mysteriously, clearing windows vault passwords might fix it.

Go to Control Panel and type ‘vault‘ in the search box at the right. It should bring up ‘Credentials Manager’.
If you are using Windows 8.X, go to the start screen and type ‘credentials’ to bring up credentials manager.

Scroll down the ‘Generic Credentials‘ and delete the ones you don’t need them.