Techetio

Doing Deadman Checks With Prometheus Metrics in MetricsQL

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:44:39 +0000

The lack of functionality to do deadman checks is one of my biggest gripes with PromQL. Fortunately, MetricsQL (a superset of PromQL) has added this functionality, and it’s very easy to use. If you’re not familiar with MetricsQL, it’s the built in query language in VictoriaMetrics, a horizontally scalable time series database. VictoriaMetrics is my go to database for storing Prometheus metrics because of how performant and easy to use it is compared to alternatives like Mimir or Thanos.

Setting Up A Grafana Loki Demo Environment on Kubernetes

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:10:12 +0000

I recently wanted to set up a small Loki environment on Kubernetes just to see how it worked, evaluate how it performs out of the box, and decide if it was something I wanted to use for a small logging environment. Grafana has Helm charts available and instructions on how to use them for this specific purpose, but I (among many others based on the countless GitHub issues) have still had an incredibly difficult time setting up the simplest possible Loki environment. Because of that, I figured I would put out what ended up working for me.

How To: Running Your Own Large Language Model On Linux

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 19:30:55 +0000

With the recent advent of large language models, the open source community has done what they tend to do quite often, and they created their own. There are all sorts of tools out there for running your own large language models, and all sorts of pretrained models that you can use out of the box or even build on top of. I’ll be going over the easiest way (updated and still accurate for 2025) to run your own large language model on your own computer.

A Seamless Authenticated Proxy Solution For Selenium

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 20:41:08 +0000

Forwarding Requests To An Authenticated Proxy With Squid

In my web scraping adventures, I’ve run into the problem of attempting to use an authenticated proxy with Selenium. Using a proxy is relatively easy to configure in most web browsers, but handling authentication with proxies in selenium is far less trivial. For instance in Chrome, the solution is to create an extension with a listener on the onAuthRequired event in order to know when to submit the credentials for the proxy. These hacks vary across web browsers as well.

Calling Command Line Tools With The Python Subprocess Module

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 06:26:20 +0000

Being able to use and control external tools within a programming language is a valuable resource. Obviously its ideal to have libraries and modules for such things, but sometimes when you’re trying to move fast, it may be easier to interact with a command line tool directly than implement a library/module. I’ll be going over to use nmap using the subprocess module in Python.

Subprocess in Python

First we can import our subprocess module. This is built into the standard library in Python so it doesn’t require any external dependencies.

Creating A Default DEV Container File For GitHub Codespaces

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 11:46:12 +0000

GitHub Codespaces is an incredible offering that lets you run Visual Studio Code within a Docker container in the cloud, from your browser. What makes this offering a real game changer is when you couple that with all the dependencies needed to get a development environment configured correctly. Imagine how much time this would save developers working on larger complicated projects. I know I’ve definitely worked on projects where I spent hours finding all the random dependencies and compiler settings needed just to get the project to build. For some of my projects, I made an effort to set up some files for Codespace to use that would get other developers set up in less than a minute.

Reducing Docker ext4.vhdx File Size On Windows

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 05:50:52 +0000

A common issue I’ve ran into when running Docker Desktop on Windows is a virtual drive consuming a large amount of disk space. If the common methods of reducing the disk space used by Docker yield no results, you can take some extra measures.

Hopefully it goes without saying, you should regularly run the below command to get rid of any dangling and unused images eating up disk space:

docker system prune -a

If you still notice a vhdx file using a considerable amount of disk space, you can run the following commands in a command prompt to shrink the vhdx file:

How To Limit Core Dump Size In Docker

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 21:57:59 +0000

You may be filling up the disk with core dumps causing outages in your application. Or you’re troubleshooting Docker failures and don’t need 3000 core dumps. Whatever it is, you’ve decided to limit the size the core dumps can consume within Docker. Fortunately, this is a really easy fix.

The docker run command has a flag for --ulimit which can be used to set all sorts of resource limits within the container. If you’re familiar with Linux, you’ll likely have encountered ulimit in some sort of context before, and it’s behavior is exactly the same in Docker. In order to limit the core size, we need to run our containers with something like this:

Finding The Largest Directories on Linux

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 20:45:42 +0000

Managing disk space on a Linux machine is a critical aspect of system administration. As data accumulates over time, it’s essential to identify which directories are consuming the most space. One powerful command that can help you with this task is ‘du’ (disk usage) in combination with ‘sort’. In this article, I’ll go over how to use the ‘du’ command along with ‘sort’ to find the largest directories on a Linux machine.

Sending OpenTelemetry Logs To Vector Using Python

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 01:25:21 +0000

In the world of software development, log management plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of applications and detecting potential issues. Vector is an open source project currently maintained by DataDog that provides robust capability for collecting, transforming, and routing logs. OpenTelemetry is an observability framework that simplifies the process of collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data, including logs, from within your application through the use of SDKs. In this article, we will explore a simple example of sending logs to Vector using the Python OpenTelemetry SDK.

How to Secure Your Docker Environment with NordVPN

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 04:41:12 +0000

Docker is a powerful tool that allows you to easily deploy and manage applications in a containerized environment. If you’re also a user of NordVPN, you may wish to pass the traffic coming from your Docker containers through Nord to secure your internet connection and protect your online privacy. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how to set up NordVPN on a Docker container and use it to protect the internet connection off other Docker containers as well. Let’s get started!

Evaluating Backend Options For Prometheus Metrics

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 03:49:03 +0000

I’ve recently been looking at consolidating metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into one horizontally scalable central store. There’s plenty of open source options out there, with the most notable being Thanos, Cortex (now Mimir), Victoria Metrics, M3DB, etc.

I’ve managed to narrow my search down to Mimir and Victoria Metrics. The main reason for going with these two is that they offer support for more metric formats than just Prometheus, and while this isn’t a requirement, for my specific use case it’s a nice to have. Mimir has major support behind it through it’s creator, Grafana Labs, as well as the open source community surrounding Grafana and it’s umbrella of products. While Victoria Metrics isn’t quite as known as Grafana Labs or Mimir, it has plenty of open source support behind it, and an Enterprise offering there to maintain and build upon it.

Live Utility Meter Monitoring With Grafana & Software Defined Radio

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 02:42:30 +0000

Ever wondered what your utility bill was going to be before you got it? Or wanted to see your utility usage live? Well you’re in luck, because most utility meters nowadays typically transmit this data over radio frequencies (RF) or cellular. In the case of cellular, your utility company probably already has a fairly up to date dashboard of your usage. But in the case of RF, your utility company still has to have someone get close-ish to the meter to read it. They usually do this by just driving around the neighborhood once a month. The focus of this article is going to be on reading RF based utility meters.

InfluxDB V2: Using The V1 API For V1 Dependent Applications

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 01:32:28 +0000

With the expanded feature set that InfluxDB V2 offers, many want to upgrade their existing V1 InfluxDB installations. The issue is that there are a lot of incompatibilities between V1 and V2. Any of your systems writing to InfluxDB, like Telegraf, will need to be updated to use the new influxdb_v2 plugin, since this new version comes with token based authentication instead of user based authentication. The query language is also different in V2, which spells trouble if you have something like Grafana set up. Even the intern doesn’t want to rewrite every panel in every dashboard to use the Flux language instead of InfluxQL.

What Can The Telegraf Agent Do?

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 16:57:40 +0000

Well when it comes to monitoring, it covers all the basics you’ll probably ever encounter. For those who don’t know, the Telegraf agent is a monitoring agent that can be installed on servers (or any computer for that matter) to give you information on how the server is performing. The basics in this case are usage metrics for CPU, Memory, Network, Disk Space, Disk IO, etc.

But it’d be remiss to say this is what Telegraf is, because it can do so much more than that. Sure the common use case is probably just being used as an agent on servers to grab systemic metrics, but those who are only using it for this are really missing out.