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Automation Analytics: Part 2 – Looking at Data Collection

We recently released Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform which now includes multiple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, one of which is Automation Analytics.  This offering provides a visual dashboard, health notifications and organization statistics for your Ansible Automation. Automation Analytics works across multiple Ansible Tower clusters allowing holistic analytics across your entire automation infrastructure.

In a previous blog I wrote about Getting Started with Automation Analytics, but now want to expand on what data is collected and how to gain access to that data.  I highly recommend reading the previous blog if you are new to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Ansible Tower concepts and our SaaS offerings. This is important to many customers because they all have their own security concerns with what data leaves their premises as well as  obligations to their own customers and stakeholders to make sure data sent will not be compromised in any way.

 

Retrieving the data:

Analyzing the data

config.json

counts.json

cred_type_counts.json

events_table.csv

instance_info.json

inventory_counts.json

job_counts.json

job_instance_counts.json

manifest.json

org_counts.json

projects_by_scm_type.json

query_info.json

unified_jobs_table.csv

unified_job_template_table.csv

Where to go next?

Retrieving the data:

Login to the Ansible Tower host with Continue reading

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The Week in Internet News: $1,200 a Month for Internet Service?

Gold-plated Internet access: Ulukhaktok, a small town in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is exploring ways to build its own broadband network after complaints of slow speeds and data caps, Vice.com reports. The price for exceeding the 10 GB data cap cost one resident $1,200 for the month. As part of the community-led effort, several residents have completed training on community networks with the Internet Society, which is supporting the project.

Editing ordered: Singapore’s government has ordered Facebook to “correct” a user’s post that contained accusations about the arrest of a supposed whistleblower and election rigging, in the first use of the country’s fake news law, Reuters says. The government called the allegations “false” and “scurrilous” and ordered blogger Alex Tan to issue a correction. But Tan does not live in Singapore and says he is an Australian citizen, and he refused to comply.

China joins in: Meanwhile, the Chinese government is targeting fake news and deep fake videos under new Internet content rules, Reuters reports. In addition, any use of AI or virtual reality needs to be clearly marked in a prominent manner in the government’s efforts against deep fakes. Failure to follow the rules could be considered a criminal Continue reading

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Keeping Pace In A Fast-Moving AI Space

During the Intel AI Summit earlier this month where the company demonstrated its initial processors for artificial intelligence training and inference workloads, Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel, spoke about the rapid pace of evolution in the AI space that also includes machine learning and deep learning. …

Keeping Pace In A Fast-Moving AI Space was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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IT certifications and training center

Certifications show that you’re committed to your job, have specific skills and are willing to up your game. Check out our online training courses and guides to top certifications -- all part of your Insider Pro subscription.

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IT certifications and training center

Certifications show that you’re committed to your job, have specific skills and are willing to up your game. Check out our online training courses and guides to top certifications -- all part of your Insider Pro subscription.

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Welcome to Insider Pro’s certifications and training center

Certifications show that you’re committed to your job, have specific skills and are willing to up your game. Check out our online training courses and guides to top certifications -- all part of your Insider Pro subscription.

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Welcome to Insider Pro’s certifications and training center

Certifications show that you’re committed to your job, have specific skills and are willing to up your game. Check out our online training courses and guides to top certifications -- all part of your Insider Pro subscription.

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VXLAN Book errata updates 30-Nov, 2019

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Questions to Ask About Product Using Overhyped Technology

I stumbled upon a great MIT Technology Review article (warning: regwall ahead) with a checklist you SHOULD use whenever considering a machine-learning-based product.

While the article focuses on machine learning at least some of the steps in that list apply to any new product that claims to use a brand new technology in a particular problem domain like overlay virtual networking with blockchain:

Read more ...

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Efficient lock-free durable sets

Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA’19

Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memory. Unfortunately, a very similar set of issues to those concerned with flushing volatile memory to persistent disk exist here too, just at another level. Memory might be durable, but…

…it is expected that caches and registers will remain volatile. Therefore the state of data structures underlying standard algorithms might not be complete in the NVRAM view, and after a crash this view might not be consistent because of missed writes that were in the caches but did not reach the memory. Moreover, for better performance, the processor may change the order in which writes reach the NVRAM, making it difficult for the NVRAM to even reflect a consistent prefix of the computation.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

So, we’re going to need to take care that everything we say is committed is truly durable, and that we can recover to a consistent state following a crash. The traditional way to accomplish this is with a write-ahead log. You’ll no doubt be familiar with the phrase Continue reading

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HPE, DoE partner for AI-driven energy efficiency

HP Enterprise has partnered with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a unit of the Department of Energy, to create AI and machine learning-systems for greater data-center energy efficiency.The Department of Energy lab will provide HPE with multiple years’ worth of historical data from sensors within its supercomputers and in its Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) High-Performance Computing (HPC) Data Center, one of the world's most efficient data centers. This information will help other organizations to optimize their own operations, said NREL.To read this article in full, please click here

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HPE, DoE partner for AI-driven energy efficiency

HP Enterprise has partnered with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a unit of the Department of Energy, to create AI and machine learning-systems for greater data-center energy efficiency.The Department of Energy lab will provide HPE with multiple years’ worth of historical data from sensors within its supercomputers and in its Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) High-Performance Computing (HPC) Data Center, one of the world's most efficient data centers. This information will help other organizations to optimize their own operations, said NREL.To read this article in full, please click here

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SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles — November 2019

Juniper Guns for Cisco, Aruba With Mist AI; Michael Dell: The Future of Tech Is Autonomous; and HPE...

Read More »

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5G Is No Panacea for IoT

Industry observers agree that the outlook for IoT is up, but the trajectory of that growth and...

Read More »

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Worth Reading: Resilience Engineering

Starting with my faking disaster recovery tests blog post Terry Slattery wrote a great article delving into the intricacies of DR testing, types of expected disasters, and resilience engineering. As always, a fantastic read from Terry.

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Fast Friday- Perry Mason Moments

It’s the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the US which means lots of people discussing things with their relatives. And, as is often the case, lots of arguments. It’s the nature of people to have a point of view and then to want to defend it. And it’s not just politics or other divisive topics. We see it all the time in networking too.

EIGRP vs OSPF. Cisco vs Juniper. ACI vs NSX. You name it and we’ve argued about it. Every viewpoint has a corresponding counterpart. Yes, there are good points for using one versus the other. But there are also times when every piece of factual information doesn’t matter because we “know” the right answer.

It’s those times when we run into what I call the “Perry Mason Problem”. It’s a reminder of the old Perry Mason TV show when the lawyer in the title would win a case with a carefully crafted statement that just ends any arguments. It’s often called a Wham Line or an Armor-Piercing Question. Basically, Mr. Mason would ask a question or make a statement that let all the air out of the argument. And often it would result in him winning the case Continue reading

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Getting traffic into GKE Cluster

In this blog, I will talk about different options for getting traffic from external world into GKE cluster. The options described are: Network load balancer(NLB) Http load balancer with ingress Http load balancer with Network endpoint groups(NEG) nginx Ingress controller Istio ingress gateway For each of the above options, I will deploy a simple helloworld … Continue reading Getting traffic into GKE Cluster →

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[4/4] Composition & Service Function Chaining in Network Service Meshes

Following the Path

Welcome to part four of this series. This this final part, we will explore our options for networking a composed application, from a de-composed monolith or set of microservices.

Here is a logical set of options:

1. Proxy: Having a network kernel, ADC or proxy for every component to handle implementation of the service chain. Sidecars quickly solve an issue, but double component count within a mesh. Proxies work well in public and private clouds, but for commercial applications may incur license costs as well as higher resource utilisation to cover the sidecar container.

2. Language specific libraries: which wrap your application packets in a NSH handling outer encapsulation. No sidecar required, no modification of a host. This adds complexity to software development in terms of modified socket libraries, but a well designed and implemented library does not expose the complexity. All your code has to do, is accept connections through a modified socket library. This works in the cloud providing security policies and routing domains allow it.

3. Overlay: Add flow data to forwarding entities. Let’s face it, this isn’t going to happen in a cloud environment unless you’ve implemented a full overlay. An OpenVSwitch (OVS) overlay network would Continue reading

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[3/4] Composition & Service Function Chaining in Network Service Meshes

Application De-Composition

Applications are ever evolving and so are the architecture patterns:

MONOLITH -> MICROSERVICES -> FUNCTIONS + FLOWS

Monoliths were easy. Route to them and send the returned packets back to their source.

Microservices (MS) sees a monolith or new application being reduced to smaller self-contained parts, which may talk east-west or north-south. It’s quite common to see a proxy deal with inbound connections and internal communication between components hidden from external interactions. Internal communication typically is either point-to-point (also could be through a load balancer/proxy) or via a message bus of some description.

Functions & Flows makes life even more interesting. We further break down the components of microservices to individual functions that deliver pages, computation and web application components etc. More flow information exists on the whole and the number of points involved in an interaction with an application increase with every de-aggregated component deployed.

For brevity, I’m going to call Functions & Flows, F2. I’ve never seen it shortened to this, so if you see it elsewhere, let me know!

To add to this, MS and F2 components may reside on different infrastructure, separated by the internet and differing policies. Thus, deduced, different IP underlying capabilities.

Continue reading

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[2/4] Composition & Service Function Chaining in Network Service Meshes

Not Storing State in the Network

OpenFlow (OF) adoption failed due to scalability of forwarding tables on ASICS, not so great controllers, lack of applications and a non-existent community. OpenFlow however is still useful today for overriding forwarding decision making on a hop-by-hop basis and handling exceptions from what would otherwise be a normal steady state forwarding decision. Exceptions like bypassing limited throughput devices like DPI nodes for large known file transfers are a classic use case. We don’t care beyond simple authentication (maybe) who the client is, so take our file and don’t consume resources doing it.

OpenFlow presents flow state to an ASIC, state that can be granular. If we use it for forwarding equivalency classes (FECs) then it’s no different to normal routing and frame forwarding. That wasn’t the goal and thus, it added to the list of failure reasons. A controller programs flows via an OpenFlow interface on a network element, flows which could time out automatically or be long-lived, requiring the controller to remove them. Also, flows can be programmed proactively from a network design, or reactively from the controller receiving a header packet and deciding what to do with it. Vendors naturally added to Continue reading