Introducing ebpf_exporter

Introducing ebpf_exporter

This is an adapted transcript of a talk I gave at Promcon 2018. You can find slides with additional information on our Prometheus deployment and presenter notes here. There's also a video.

Tip: you can click on the image to see the original large version.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

Here at Cloudflare we use Prometheus to collect operational metrics. We run it on hundreds of servers and ingest millions of metrics per second to get insight into our network and provide the best possible service to our customers.

Prometheus metric format is popular enough, it's now being standardized as OpenMetrics under Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's exciting to see convergence in long fragmented metrics landscape.

In this blog post we'll talk about how we measure low level metrics and share a tool that can help you to get similar understanding of your systems.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

There are two main exporters one can use to get some insight into a Linux system performance.

The first one is node_exporter that gives you information about basics like CPU usage breakdown by type, memory usage, disk IO stats, filesystem and network usage.

The second one is cAdvisor, that gives similar metrics, but drills down to a container level. Instead Continue reading

Weekend Reads 082418

During the 27th Usenix Security Symposium held in Baltimore, MD last week, a group of researchers from China revealed results obtained from a large-scale analysis DNS interceptions. @CircleID

The increasingly distributed nature of computing and the rapid growth in the number of the small connected devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) are combining with trends like the rise of silicon-level vulnerabilities highlighted by Spectre, Meltdown, and more recent variants to create an expanding and fluid security landscape that’s difficult for enterprises to navigate. —Jeffrey Burt @The Next Platform

Many online accounts allow you to supplement your password with a second form of identification, which can prevent some prevalent attacks. The second factors you can use to identify yourself include authenticator apps on your phone, which generate codes that change every 30 seconds, and security keys, small pieces of hardware similar in size and shape to USB drives. —Stuart Schechter @Medium

If this is a three-way tension, then it’s clear that we are not equals at the table here. It seems that as users we continually get short-changed when it comes to access to tools and technologies that can allow us to preserve our personal safety and security. Continue reading

Fog Computing and Networking

To meet the needs of the emerging applications and networks, the clouds are descending toward the ground and even dispersed among the client devices – forming fog computing and networking or fog. Learn more about fog computing at Fog World Congress 2018.

Check Out Our Newest Collaboration Video!

Do you want to obtain your CCNP Collaboration or perhaps enhance your Cisco Collaboration skills for the real world? The CCNP Advanced Technologies v1 course from INE is targeted at network and voice professionals who want to take their Cisco Collaboration knowledge to the next level.

This course is intended for network and voice professionals looking to further improve their knowledge or prepare themselves for the CIPTV1 exam. In this course we will be looking at CUCM and VCS Dial Plan, Voice + Video Calling, IOS Gateway, Conferencing, QoS, On Cluster Calling with CUCM and Media Resources. This course will be delivered in lecture based format with plenty of hands on practical demonstrations.

CIPTV1 – Implementing Cisco IP Telephony & Video’ will cover professional to advanced level concepts and demonstrations around a large portion of the Cisco Unified Communications portfolio, including some of the below products and topics:

  • Cisco Unified Communications Manager Dial Plan and Media Resources
  • Cisco VCS Dial Plan
  • IOS Gateways – Digital Voice, Dial-Peers, Translation Rules
  • Conferencing with Cisco Conductor and Cisco Telepresence Server
  • Quality of Service
About The Instructor:

Dean Babbage is a Voice and Network Professional actively working in the Cisco Partner community. He carries Continue reading

Fixing My Twitter

It’s no surprise that Twitter’s developers are messing around with the platform. Again. This time, it’s the implementation of changes announced back in May. Twitter is finally cutting off access to their API that third party clients have been using for the past few years. They’re forcing these clients to use their new API structure for things like notifications and removing support for streaming. This new API structure also has a hefty price tag. For 250 users it’s almost $3,000/month.

You can imagine the feedback that Twitter has gotten. Users of popular programs like Tweetbot and Twitterific were forced to degrade client functionality thanks to the implementation of these changes. Twitter power users have been voicing their opinions with the hashtag #BreakingMyTwitter. I’m among the people that are frustrated that Twitter is chasing the dollar instead of the users.

Breaking The Bank

Twitter is beholden to a harsh mistress. Wall Street doesn’t care about user interface or API accessibility. They care about money. They care are results and profit. And if you aren’t turning a profit you’re a loser that people will abandon. So Twitter has to make money somehow. And how is Twitter supposed to make money in today’s Continue reading

The Internet Society and Global Scribes Work Together to Amplify Young Voices

On International Youth Day, the Internet Society and Global Scribes partnered to connect youth around the world to let their voices be heard, allowing them to become empowered and engaged global citizens, striving toward a more united and sustainable digital future.

As local and international actors innovate to solve the most pressing issues that we face in the world today, young people are often left out of the equation with little or no participation in important discussions and decision-making processes.

Youth across the world are often overlooked as a potential resource to solving global challenges, such as climate change, migration, health, and unemployment, despite being directly impacted by these issues and having opinions on how to solve them.

This also happens in the Internet ecosystem, where young people often do not have a place at the table when it comes to decisions that shape the Internet’s future.

While youth are recognized as “the future generation” and perceived as key to a more sustainable tomorrow, they are seldom given adequate platforms to let their voices be heard or allow them to contribute to their societies in a meaningful way, in their own right as youth.

Young people are often deprived of the opportunity to serve as catalysts for a more united and sustainable world Continue reading

Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers

Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers

Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here

AfPIF 2018 Day Three: Cloud Infrastructure, Local Content, and More

The growth of cloud infrastructure in Africa has been credited with the growth of local content in many regions, and it holds the key for Africa’s ability to attract content carriers and distribution networks.

The first panel of day three at the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) was dedicated to discussing the current scenario of cloud infrastructure and what it will take to grow the sector further, get the market interested, and eventually grow the level of content hosted locally.

South Africa has the most extensive cloud market, compared to other African countries, and it took concerted efforts from the different players, under the ISP Association, for the market to be deregulated and the laws to be put in place. The laws can take time, but industry players agree the laws are vital to investments in the market.

Although the industry may be small in Africa, cybersecurity is key, as businesses are susceptible to cybercrime, just like other global operators. That means the enactment of cyber security laws in the different countries, and continued training and awareness by industry players.

Power and cooling is another vital part, with many countries enjoying monopoly of power distribution. Liquid Telecom said Continue reading

Updated: Networking Modules in Building Next-Generation Data Centers Online Course

We migrated the self-study materials for the network infrastructure and services module of the Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course into the new format, and split the largest module of the course into manageable chunks: data center fabrics 101, designing leaf-and-spine fabrics, overlay virtual networking, IPv6 and network services.

Feedback on the new format is obviously highly welcome. Thank you!

Training classifiers with natural language explanations

Training classifiers with natural language explanations Hancock et al., ACL’18

We looked at Snorkel earlier this week, which demonstrates that maybe AI isn’t going to take over all of our programming jobs. Instead, we’ll be writing labelling functions to feed the machine! Perhaps we could call this task label engineering. To me, it feels a bit like programming a quick-and-dirty expert system, where the downstream generative model deals with all the inaccuracies and inconsistencies so that we don’t have to be perfect, just useful. Given the success of the approach, a natural question to ask is how we can enable end users to more easily create useful labelling functions in their domain. This is where BabbleLabble comes in!

In this work, we propose BabbleLabble, a framework for training classifiers in which an annotator provides a natural language explanation for each labeling decision. A semantic parser converts these explanations into programmatic labeling functions that generate noisy labels for an arbitrary amount of unlabeled data, which is used to train a classifier.

So much for those programming jobs ! ?

Working with BabbleLabble, it takes users about twice as long per example to provide a label plus an explanation as it does just Continue reading

Junos Kafka & InfluxDB Exporters

This post acts as the introduction for two other posts, which cover Junos data collection tools for Kafka and InfluxDB. The code is open-sourced and licensed under MIT. Both applications are ready for release and I’ve spent considerable spare time building and testing both pieces of software.

To Go or not to Go

Back in yesteryear, I used to be a C developer and enthusiast. Thanks to the infamous K&R C book, it made perfect sense when I needed a language that provided syntax what I thought of at the time as one level higher than assembly.
Roll the clock forwards a decade and Go has become my ‘go to’ (multi-pun intended) language. It’s powerful from its simplicity, easy to debug and super easy to observe when things aren’t going as you planned. The concurrency capabilities seem to make perfect sense and development cycles are short thanks to the powerful “batteries included” tool-chain. Building binaries couldn’t be easier and building containers for the likes of Docker is a piece of cake. Thanks also to the language’s popularity, tools like Travis-CI are easy to work with. Powerful enough to do almost anything, easy enough to learn in days and offers Continue reading

NSX Cloud at VMworld US 2018

We have done a series of blogs on NSX Cloud in the last couple of weeks and the response has been great! We have customers who have purchased licenses already and are on-route to deployment, customers with whom we have completed POCs successfully, and a pipeline that looks promising. Meanwhile, recognitions continue to flow from all sides, CRN rated NSX Cloud as one of the 10 best SDN solutions for 2018 and NSX Cloud was judged as Best of Show runners-up in the cloud computing category at Interop Tokyo. With all this excitement and VMworld around the corner, we couldn’t help but write again to provide more updates. So, here we go!

 

Before reading on, if you would like to quickly go over past blogs, here is your single pane of glass to past blogs *wink*. You can find a high-level overview of VMware’s vision for Virtual Cloud Network and how NSX Cloud fits into the broader vision over here. If you are like, duh! I know that, can you just give me an overview about NSX Cloud… we hear you and this is where you could go to refresh your memory on NSX Cloud.  If you are Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Does your network have a trade imbalance?

Network traffic, by nature, is often unbalanced. For example, a client that requests a video on demand may receive ten times more bandwidth than it sends for that service. Likewise, most web applications are very one-sided, with the bulk of the traffic being from server to client. The opposite is true for many backup applications, where the bulk of the traffic originates at the client and terminates at the server.The United States is like your network – suffering from a trade imbalance. For every packet we ship to a foreign network, we are receiving four or five in return. Just as there are barriers to trade, we apply barriers to our inbound traffic. The barrier for most of us is the actual size of our Internet service interface. Packets queue up and drop at our carrier’s equipment prior to even being seen by our equipment. If you purchase a 50Meg download speed, any packets that arrive at a faster rate (even for a sub-second of time) will be dropped without prejudice. This is a barrier, restriction and tariff on your services that limit your business. The only solution – buy more bandwidth!To read this article in full, please Continue reading

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