What is and Why use Logstash?

At my place of employment we have recently set up Zabbix for our infrastructure monitoring. To complement that system and allow easier and faster diagnosis of problems detected we have looked into building a centralized logging system for our servers and applications. This has been an ongoing search but we never found something that truly fit our needs. Recently, I came across Logstash which uses a program written in JRuby which operates like many Unix style programs. It is described to be similar to sed. Logstash is designed to chain a number of filters together to process an input source and output to many different places. One of them is to Elasticsearch which allows for easy searching, pattern matching and even correlation without needing to dump the entire system in a backend SQL database which is often slow and cumbersome to use on unstructured data like log files are.

This post will be a set of steps to install and configure a Centralized install of Logstash. It will be tested with Apache access logs.

How To: Install Pacemaker + PgPool-II 3.1 on CentOS 5.7

This is the second post on the clustering system I have been a part of designing and implementing. In this post I will be walking through how to build a highly available instance of pgPool-II 3.1. If you don’t know what pgPool-II is, it is a load balancing, connection pooling and database replication system for PostgreSQL. We use it for when Bad Things Happen and we don’t want customers to notice. Currently, this guide won’t walk you through installing pgPool-II, but it will walk you through making a current install clustered and highly available.

How To: Install CoroSync + Pacemaker on CentOS 5.6

In this post we will be setting up CoroSync and Pacemaker on CentOS to create an easily managed cluster for different resources. There are many options available to create a cluster, Hearbeat being one of the oldest, but the development team I am a part of have settled on this combination as it is the most likely to receive security and feature updates as clustering systems change. It also takes advantage of some of the items that Heartbeat does a good job of managing currently while adding far easier management and scalability that wasn’t possible with only Heartbeat 2.

Hello World: New Blog System

This is my new Blog and foray into Markdown. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, lets see how it works for me. If you haven’t heard of Octopress or Markdown I highly recommend them.

But, with anything new, we don’t know how it goes until we try!

So, here goes…

-Myles