If you work with Data Guard, the lag between the primary and standby database is an informative but difficult metric to measure. I’ve encountered some “solutions” that use the COMPLETION_TIME in (G)V$ARCHIVED_LOG for the standby destination as the time of…

Google cloud instances run on top of KVM hypervisor. In newer KVM versions, such as the one used in Google Cloud, virtio-scsi is used instead of an older virtio-blk storage backend. The virtio-scsi disk devices looks like: In RHEL6, a module…

Lift and shift migration using tools like Cloudendure is the fastest way to migrate ‘on premises’ systems to Google Cloud. When the migration is complete, the environment can be refactored to use cloud-native capabilities. During application testing after a recent automated…

Introduction In this blog post, I’m not going to talk about what the term SRE means or how it works. My understanding is that Google has invented the term “Site Reliability Engineer” and that this is Google’s way of doing…

In the TICK stack from influxdata , Telegraf is used to collect and send data to influxdb. Metrics in Influxdb can then be viewed using visualization tools like Grafana. There are several input and output plugins for telegraf, which can…

Minto Joseph explains how to run logstash in Amazon EC2 Container Service.

Chris Stankaitis, Team Manager, Site Reliability Engineering at Pythian, reflects on the theme of change at LISA16.

Kevin Pedersen, Team Manager, Service Reliability Engineering at Pythian, provides some considerations to keep your Terraform environment manageable.

Rohan Bhagat, Systems Administrator at Pythian, details his findings and experiences after deploying his own Hadoop cluster.

The behavior of vm.swappiness was always a bit confusing for novice linux users, as setting vm.swappiness to 0 would not completely disable swapping in the system during a memory crunch. vm.swappiness would only affect the agressiveness of swapping. Following upstream…