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)

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.

VS

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When working with shells, if your Mac does not show various colors automatically, you can enable them by two easy steps.

First add a line as shown below to your .bash_profile. This file should be under your home directory.

export CLICOLOR=1

Second, add the following line in your .vimrc file. This file should be under your home directory. If it is not there, create one.

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Virtualization is a technique using which you can run multiple Operating Systems (aka Guest) in a physical server (host) by abstracting (or virtualizing) CPU, Memory, Disk and Network resources. The core component of any virtualization solution is Hypervisor – the software that performs the abstraction of bare metal resources.

Here are the primary benefits of using Virtualization:

1. Save cost on hardware
2. Centrally manage the infrastructure
3. Add effective fault tolerance and high availability
4. Dynamically update the infrastructure

The diagram below shows virtualization at a high level.

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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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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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Software installation has never been more fulfilling since YUM came along.

YUM is the most popular rpm based interactive package manager. It is super powerful and reliable.

In this quick article, I show how to install apache web server, the world’s most popular web server in your Linux Server.

You need to have root access to do this. You also need to have internet access on the server you are installing apache.

Simply run the command

sudo yum install httpd

That’s it. Yum does the rest.

Once done, which takes about 10 seconds, start the httpd server

Sudo service httpd start

Once the service starts, simply use a browser to access the server (use the default server name or the ip address).

Or you can choose the geeky way to use curl to test out. I created a basic html file. Here is how to access it

Curl http://localhost/index.html

You can check access.log to see how you did. Access_log is present under /var/log/httpd/

The configuration file for apache (httpd.conf) will be under /etc/httpd. (This depends on your platform).

That’s it. Your own enterprise grade Web Server, up and running in about 10 seconds.

Way to go YUM !!

Buckle up! You can get your own AWS server in cloud. You can run a verity of OS on it, connect to any popular Database you want to and even get your hands on some of the coolest products from AWS. I don’t know about you but I’m psyched about all this.

Yes, Amazon Web Services Free Tier allows you to have your own Server in EC2 for 12 months. If you are new to AWS, this is a great way to get your feet wet, or may be drenched.

This article shows exactly how you sign up and crank up your own server in cloud. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to get your hands on a brand new Amazon Linux instance (or Windows or Suse or RHEL…..)

Without further due, here are the actual steps to follow.

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So, what can an APM tool buy you? Setting aside the hypothetical ‘Peace of mind’ marketing pitch, let me show you how exactly an APM tool can help you support your Application effectively

1. Historic Monitoring of Key Metrics

APM tool can record the monitoring metrics which are invaluable in troubleshooting. For example, take a look at the ‘response time’ graph of a particular application. You can readily see that the application suffers during business hours.

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Back in the 90s when I was working as a Solaris/HP-UX Administrator, all I needed was two or three commands to figure out what was wrong with a particular Server or Application. I will just glance at ‘vmstat’, ‘iostat’ and ‘top’ for a minute or two and the problem will reveal itself clearly. While those command still prove valuable at a certain level, in order to answer ‘Why is the application slow’ you need much more than just few OS commands.

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