Puppeteers has started a collaboration with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. This collaboration marks Puppeteers as a member of the Red Hat partner ecosystem, where it brings its expertise in automation and open-source technologies to the forefront.

Today, organizations across various sectors are under immense pressure to deliver services quickly while upholding stringent security practices. Information technology is pivotal in meeting these demands, and automation offers a compelling solution to address challenges related to scalability, predictability, and efficiency. Red Hat, renowned for its automation solutions, is at the forefront of helping organizations navigate these challenges.

Puppeteers is proud to release the first version of net-snmp-systemd-services-status. It is a net-snmp pass_persist script written in Python that queries the status of all systemd services on a system, dynamically generating OIDs based on the systemd service names. This gives the services a predictable name. Querying all services on a typical Linux VM takes less than 0.2 seconds. The information is presented to snmpd in a way that both get (snmpget) and getnext (snmpwalk) work.

Puppeteers has launched a new service product which allows you to gain control of your Cloud resources by having them imported to Terraform. This allows you to manage changes to your Cloud and radically reduces the need for the pesky “who changes this and why?”, “who set this up and is it still needed?” and “what does it do?” discussions. As a bonus you get much better visibility into your cloud.

Here’s a recording on our webinar on March 9, 2021:

• Infrastructure as Code

We covered the very basics of infrastructure as code, version control, quality assurance techniques and tools such as Puppet, Terraform, Ansible and Puppet Bolt.

The webinar slides:

Puppeteers-webinar-Infrastructure-as-Code-presentation-210309Download

Our company is about infrastructure automation and products built on top of it. That means we really don’t want to do manually what a computer can do. Therefore it was not an option to publish our blog posts first in Wordpress, then copy-and-paste them to LinkedIn. Rather, let a Wordpress plugin configured as a LinkedIn app do the hard word. So, from now on all of our blog posts should get published automatically on our “Puppeteers Oy” LinkedIn page. Let’s hope that the automation does not break too often :).

LibreNMS image version 1.65-20 is now available in the AWS Marketplace. It is a a Cloud image that runs a pre-configured LibreNMS network monitoring system. It is the easiest and fastest way to get started with LibreNMS.

Pricing is based on usage: there are no up-front license fees or other costs. This means you can test it with zero risk. Also, there is currently a free trial!

Purchase now in AWS Marketplace!

We recently wrote a Nagios plugin for getting metrics from AWS Cloudwatch to LibreNMS. As the customer was ok with releasing it as open source here it is. It is written in Ruby - we like the language and we’re also Puppet guys, so it felt like a natural choice for us.

The plugin allows getting as many metrics you want from Cloudwatch and setting alert thresholds (warning, critical) for each metric statistic (e.g. “average CPUUtilization percent”) separately. In many cases it is not useful to configure alerts for a metric (e.g. “minimum CPUUtilization percent”), but you do want to graph it regardless - this plugins allows that.

We have used XMPP (Jabber) for our internal discussions for years. In the recent years it seems that XMPP has lost some of its traction. For example, Google and Facebook used to use XMPP for instant message and Slack used to have an XMPP bridge in their service. All of those are now gone and have been replaced with proprietary messaging protocols. In the context of a big company having all the control over the protocol probably makes sense, but it of course makes life difficult for users who have to have a separate client for each or have to use a multi-protocol client such Pidgin just to keep their sanity. And none of the big players seems to “winning the war” for users.