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Description

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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Table of Contents

Description

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.


This is where in the last few years Terraform has come to the rescue and has provided a consistent way of defining infrastructure while at the same time making tracking of changes easy

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


Sounds like a dream come true, right ? Not if you're restless like me and always want to see what's under the hood...

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Table of Contents

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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Table of Contents

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.

systemctl status mongod
● mongod.service loaded failed failed MongoDB Database Server

cat /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log

“ctx”:“initandlisten”,“msg”:“Storage engine to use detected by data files”,“attr”:{“dbpath”:"/var/lib/mongodb", Functions"storageEngine":“mmapv1”}}

Cannot start server with an unknown storage engine: mmapv1"}}

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

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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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Author's picture

Mihai Tanasescu

All Rounder and Jack of all trades (master of none? :) ).
Sailing the Cloud world with my fantastic team@Aviatrix, former Network, Systems Engineer (Cisco, Juniper, Linux, Openshift, Openstack).
A flavor of Security added to the mix (Offensive Security OSCE).
If there’s anything new and cool, then I like to learn about it. I’m also a fan of deep diving under the hood of a product to see what makes it tick as well as what breaks it.

Solutions Architect @ Aviatrix

Switzerland