The phrase “almost any system or protocol” in the Locust Features/• Can test any system, leaves me with uncertainty and doesn’t define what that really means. As a developer my first question when reading this is to wonder if it can test a system that uses the CORBA IIOP protocol, which is almost unknown in 2021. I’m sure Locust can handle HTTP/HTTPS with HTML, XML, and JSON payloads, But does it handle CORBA IIOP protocol?
Locust can test any system, it just won't support every system with the built-in clients. What you'd have to do is write your own code to send requests to your system and then manually fire off Locust reporting events at the appropriate times. But you can then use Locust to distribute and orchestrate the load for you. Check out this part of the Locust docs:
https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/testing-other-systems.html
You can even find Locust runners written in other languages such as Go (boomer) and Java (Locust4j) in case Python isn't the best fit for the code you need to run.
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Jenkins's openstack-plugin uses openstack4j for talking to an openstack cloud. I'm looking for a way that we can we can monitor the amount of http(s) API calls openstack4j does, from client side perspective.
Some possible things to know:
Jenkins can tell me that? (although I believe openstack4j does the http(s) call independently)
it's running inside a container, some https call monitoring tools that I could use on that level?
Regarding your questions:
I don't think Jenkins can do this monitoring for you, in the end, it's just a big, distributed, job scheduler and runner. If there's no plugin purposefully written for this, it can't. You'd have to write it yourself.
Regarding the monitoring, there's a bunch of questions to answer, actually:
Do you want just a Java based solution?
Surprisingly, I couldn't find anything Java based, the standard Java Management Extensions (JMX) apparently do not have direct support for investigating a process' open network connections.
If it doesn't have to be Java-specific, you could use tcpdump or tshark to analyze the traffic, as long as you know where the calls go, for example.
Another generic Linux based alternative is to launch the process through strace. You might need to make some adjustments for Java.
Is the connection HTTP or HTTPS (it matters a lot)?
For HTTPS one option would be to man-in-the-middle the HTTPS connection with some sort of proxy. Then you can just check the logs of the proxy for the connections
I am looking for monitoring tool for the following use cases:
Collect basic metrics about virtual machine (cpu usage, memory usage, i/o, available space)
Extract metrics from SQL Server (probably running some queries)
Extract information from external service about processing i.e how many processing are currently running and for how long. I am thinking about writing python scripts, but don't know how to combine with monitoring tool
Have the ability to plot charts and manage alerts and it will nice to have ability to send not only mails, but send message to slack/ms teams.
I was thing about Prometheus, because it has wmi_exporter, node_exporter, sql exporter, alert manager with possibility to send notifications to multiple destinations, but I don't know what to do with this external service and python scripts.
Any suggestions?
Prometheus can definitely do what you say you need done. Some of it may not be trivial, but you can definitely fill in the blanks yourself.
E.g. you can get machine metrics basically out of the box by firing up a node_exporter and having it scraped by Prometheus, but I don't think it has e.g. information on all running processes. The latter might require you to write an agent/exporter: a simple web server that exposes metrics on /metrics; there exists a Python client library to help with that. Or have said processes (assuming they're your code) push metrics to a Pushgateway instead, if they're short lived batch jobs.
Oh, and for charts/dashboards you probably want Grafana, as Prometheus' abilities in that area are rather limited and Grafana integrates rather well with Prometheus.
I am trying to write a small script that will help me automate some of my IT tasks regarding to VLAN management.
I do not want to log-in to my switch via command-line - I want to send commands to it and get response (over the NET).
Are there any alternatives? I have started to search the web but so far I did not found anything.
I know SNMP is an option to gain info but I want to check other alternatives
thanks.
You can try Netconf Configuration Protocol, it is RPC-like management protocol which is supported by Cisco and many other vendors.
SNMP is the only widely and commonly used option here.
You can use WMI to manage Windows-based infrastructure.
There is also legacy SYSLOG protocol (RFC3164) which is UDP based.
For traffic monitoring and billing purposes there are NetFlow,
sFlow, jFlow, IPFIX and RADIUS protocols.
There are some other protocols but mostly proprietary.
So I'd suggest using SNMP which is nowadays a de-facto standard in network monitoring domain.
You might look at Expect as a scripting language solution. It is commonly used to do exactly what you are needing:
log into device (with result cases)
execute commands
save config
logout
As you build out a script library, tasks become simplified as you could do things like run scripts with parameters and have Expect do all the detail work.
See the wikipedia article for an overview.
I have also used SNMP for this kind of thing but the functionality is different because you are using an SNMP read-write privilege to upload new parts or complete configs, saving the running config to flash and/or saving the config off-device.
Try NETCONF+YANG protocol because it is currently the best option for network device configuration. More about SNMP alternatives:
https://bestmonitoringtools.com/top-snmp-alternatives-because-snmp-is-dying/
I am wanting to know what would be the best way to expose a library via zeromq. Say, I install a machine learning library (mll) on one machine, and I have a zeromq broker running on another. Now, if I have a zeromq client which needs to call functions within the mll, how can it do so via the broker.
I am wanting to know the steps I will need to take to make this work for libraries in a generic way.
Basically you need to have a "listener" that picks up data from ZMQ and feeds it to your machine-learning backend code, then transmits the results back to the requestor.
There are a lot of design choices to be made, such as what format to use to serialize data between client and server (JSON? YAML? Pickle? Thrift? ...) , and how to encode requests and request options. But all things considered, this is a pretty straightforward ZMQ usage.
The problem comes when you want a more feature-rich, complete, robust, etc. design--things like multi-threaded or multi-process servers, multi-machine scalability, secure user / request authentication and authorization, job reporting and dashboard, or job checkpointing. All those "extras" are common "network job scheduler" or "(enterprise) message broker" functions that tend to come out-of-the-box with packages like Celery or RQ.
If you don't want to go the full "message broker middleware" route, you might start by examining others' designs for lightweight ZMQ-based job brokers, such as this one from Jeff Knupp.
How might you call a Lisp program from a Rails application?... For example, allow the end user to enter a block of text in the Rails web app, have the text processed by the Lisp program and return results to the Rails app?
There are a couple ways that come to mind:
Execute the lisp program with Process. Communicate with the Lisp program via standard in, and have the Lisp program output its result over stdout.
Do the same thing as above, but communicate via named pipes instead. Have your Ruby code write data into a named pipe, then have the Lisp program read from that pipe, and write data out over another named pipe which you then read with your Ruby app. The Lisp program can either run in the background as a daemon that checks for data on its incoming pipe, or you can fire it up as-needed using Ruby's command-line utilities (as above).
Find a Ruby-Lisp bridge. I have no experience with such a bridge (nor do I know off-hand if one even exists) and I think the above 2 mechanisms are easier, but your mileage may vary.
Another simple way is to have Lisp running a HTTP server and contact Lisp from the outside via HTTP requests.
CL-JSON supports JSON-RPC. It's very easy to set up with a web server such as Hunchentoot to have a Lisp-based web service that anything that speaks JSON-RPC (e.g. this) can use.
It would depend on how often it's going to happen.
If it's once in a blue moon, then just run a backquote command that starts the lisp interpreter, or popen it and write to it.
If it happens all the time, you will need to have Lisp already running, so the question then is how to communicate. Any of the interprocessor mechanisms will work, but I would suggest a TCP socket for development, testing, and production flexibility.
If it happens a million times a day, but a toy Lisp would be good enough, it is a simple matter to implement Lisp with Ruby classes. This was done as chapter 8 of Practical Ruby Projects.