Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis

Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis He et al., ESEC/FSE’18

If something is going wrong in your system, chances are you’ve got two main sources to help you detect and resolve the issue: logs and metrics. You’re unlikely to be able to get to the bottom of a problem using metrics alone (though you might well detect one that way), so that leaves logs as the primary diagnosis tool. The online service at Microsoft used as the main case study in the paper produces dozens of Terabytes of logs every day.

Logs play a crucial role in the diagnosis of modern cloud-based online service systems. Clearly, manual problem diagnosis is very time-consuming and error-prone due to the increasing scale and complexity of large-scale systems.

Log3C analyses logs to look for indications of impactful problems, using correlated KPIs as a guide. It finds these needles in the haystack with an average precision of 0.877 and an average recall of 0.883. A distributed version of Log3C has been deployed and used in production at Microsoft for several years, both to support a massive online service (we are not told which one), and integrated into “Product B” where Continue reading

How to pick an off-site data-backup method

Everyone agrees that backups should be sent off site, but not everyone agrees on how that should be accomplished. The decision about which method to use will affect your recovery-time objective (RTO), recovery-point objective (RPO), risk level, and cost – so it’s rather important.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

The Importance of Container Visibility

Containers are unlike any other compute infrastructure. Prior to containers, compute infrastructure was composed of a set of brittle technologies that often took weeks to deploy. Containers made the automation of workload deployment mainstream, and brought workload deployment down to minutes, if not seconds.

Now, to be perfectly clear, containers themselves aren’t some sort of magical automation sauce that changed everything. Containers are something of a totem for IT operations automation, for a few different reasons.

Unlike the Virtual Machines (VMs) that preceded them, containers don’t require a full operating system for every workload. A single operating system can host hundreds or even thousands of containers, moving the necessary per-workload RAM requirement from several gigabytes to a few dozen megabytes. Similarly, containerized workloads share certain basic functions – libraries, for instance – from the host operating system, which can make maintaining key aspects of the container operating environment easier. When you update the underlying host, you update all the containers running on it.

Unlike VMs, however, containers are feature poor. For example, they have no resiliency: traditional vMotion-like workload migration doesn’t exist, and we’re only just now – several years after containers went mainstream – starting to get decent persistent Continue reading

On the ‘net: ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, was widely seen as a compromise technology that would provide the best circuit and packet switching in a single technology. Data would be input into the network in the form of either packets or circuits. The data would then be broken up into fixed sized cells, which would then be switched based on a fixed label-based header. This would allow hardware to switch the cells in a way that is like circuit switching, while retaining many of the advantages of a circuit switched network. In fact, ATM allowed for both circuit- and packet-switched paths to be both be used in the same network. @ECI’s LighTALK

IDG Contributor Network: Enterprise systems to monetize and bill for new IoT services

Enterprises adopt IoT solutions for two primary reasons. First, they want to lower their companies’ operating and capital costs. These types of IoT solutions including factory automation, remote asset monitoring, fleet management, and smart metering help enterprises improve their bottom lines by focusing on all sorts of cost reduction.Second, enterprises want to add IoT to the products they sell to their customers. This allows enterprises to bundle new connectivity-based services with their core products, thereby increasing revenue and differentiating their offerings. Examples of these types of IoT solutions include in-vehicle infotainment, connected welding equipment, connected commercial-grade power tools, and many more.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco bets $660M on silicon-photonics firm Luxtera

Cisco says it is buying optical-semiconductor firm Luxtera for $660 million and will build its silicon photonics into future enterprise data-center, webscale, and service-provider networking gear.This photonic technology is essential to keep up with projected massive increases in IP traffic volume over the next four years, according to Cisco's networking chief."Optics is a fundamental technology to enable this future. Coupled with our silicon and optics innovation, Luxtera will allow our customers to build the biggest, fastest and most efficient networks in the world," said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business at CiscoTo read this article in full, please click here

Cisco bets $660M on silicon-photonics firm Luxtera

Cisco says it is buying optical-semiconductor firm Luxtera for $660 million and will build its silicon photonics into future enterprise data-center, webscale, and service-provider networking gear.This photonic technology is essential to keep up with projected massive increases in IP traffic volume over the next four years, according to Cisco's networking chief."Optics is a fundamental technology to enable this future. Coupled with our silicon and optics innovation, Luxtera will allow our customers to build the biggest, fastest and most efficient networks in the world," said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business at CiscoTo read this article in full, please click here

Cisco bets $660M on silicon-photonics firm Luxtera

Cisco says it is buying optical-semiconductor firm Luxtera for $660 million and will build its silicon photonics into future enterprise data-center, webscale, and service-provider networking gear.This photonic technology is essential to keep up with projected massive increases in IP traffic volume over the next four years, according to Cisco's networking chief."Optics is a fundamental technology to enable this future. Coupled with our silicon and optics innovation, Luxtera will allow our customers to build the biggest, fastest and most efficient networks in the world," said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business at CiscoTo read this article in full, please click here

Ansible Tips and Tricks: Dealing with Unreliable Connections and Services

Ansible Dealing with Unreliable Connections and Services

Red Hat Ansible Automation is widely known to automate and configure Linux and Windows hosts, as well as network automation for routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers. Plus, there are a variety of modules that deal with the cloud and the API around it such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine.  And there are other modules that interact with Software as a Service (SaaS) tools like Slack or ServiceNow. Although the downtime for these APIs is very minimal, it does happen, and it is even more likely that the connection between your Ansible control host (where you are running Ansible from) and the cloud-centric API could be down.

In this blog post, I will cover some tips and tricks for dealing with unreliable connections to cloud-centric APIs and how I build Ansible Playbooks in a reliable manner. As a technical marketing engineer, I consider my customers the Red Hat field teams, and often Solutions Architects are running playbooks from unreliable hotel wireless, coffee shops and sometimes even airplanes! I have to make sure playbooks have some more robustness built in for these odd situations. It is hair-pulling frustrating to get through a 20 task Continue reading

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