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If you landed here then you must have searched for examples about how you can get Dynatrace to work with Aviatrix.

Worry not…I also searched for those as I’m a pretty lazy person and prefer not to reinvent the wheel if I can avoid it.

I found a VSCode dynatrace plugin that makes things easier but then no premade examples so I went out to try Chat GPT / Gemini AI.

I lost 1h thinking that AI is the holy grail which will save me time and I was proven wrong.

Not a single line of code from it worked. I just ended up being frustrated.

See below what I came up with and how…

Also, to avoid confusion between VSCode and Dynatrace I call:

• plugin the Dynatrace VSCode extension itself (which enables you to write Dynatrace Portal Extensions)
• extension the Dynatrace extensions that get uploaded to their service and are used for gathering metrics and setting up Dynatrace-Aviatrix monitoring

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Each time I visit a potentially new customer, there’s always that moment after a sip of coffee, after a few whiteboarding events and heated technical discussions when the following question pops up:

“How do you manage this Multicloud environment ?”
“Isn’t this complex for my Operations Team ?"

If you had asked me this 5-6 years ago…I would have probably said yes.
I was there jumping into action, incidents in the middle of the night, pager alarms and zombie eyes after 4-5h of sleep and the rollercoaster just kept going.

The daily struggle to reduce configuration and administration headaches was something real. I used Bash scripts, Python, Ruby, a mix of various vendor tools and still lost a lot of time investigating each time what went wrong.

(hint: Github/Gitlab + a CI/CD pipeline).

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Description

I recently had to configure Strongswan with Certificate Authentication to a Checkpoint GW and got lost a bit in all the articles I could find about the openssl utility and how to generate a CA, CSRs, sign a certificate and so on.
I will summarize here the steps required for generating the CA/cert so that everything is in a single place.

I give an example with RSA and one with ECDSA.

The changes are minimal.

On the Checkpoint side I only had to import the CA from Strongswan side and configure it under the Public Key auth pertaining to the Network Interoperable Device (representation of 3rd party device Checkpoint wise).

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Description

I was using a custom solution running MongoDB in the Backend on Ubuntu 18.04 and recently decided to try out an

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

I got quickly reminded why doing such operations require a bit more planning ahead instead of the just do it way of thinking.

Luckily in IT, there’s always a solution for everything and a chance to reverse engineer what happened…

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You know those moments when you need to connect to a corporate VPN and all the steps and clicks are just getting terribly annoying? Well I went through the same phase and decided to write something to make my life a tad easier.

Setup:

• Cisco Anyconnect
• After clicking on Connect you get a username and password prompt
• Password is the token generate inside MobilePASS app (that runs on the Mac and not on the phone:) )
• MobilePASS app has a token registered inside of it and synced with your employer called generically “My Token”

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I’ll keep this one simple and put here two schemas that I found on the Internet for the concept of redo and undo logs in Oracle. I don’t know about other people but I work must easier with schemas and a few words rather than 100 pages long documents filled with just text.

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