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With the advent of various programming technologies and their broad support toward a lot of stuffs, our needs have escalated over the years, making computers and similar automatic devices our friend, relative, and teacher and guides many times. The need for integrating our daily use devices to these machines has become more and more important. Finding the various fields
of application for the use of these revolutionary machines is not a new era of research, but even now it has much potential to attract the programmers for making it more functional for simplifying their daily life tasks.
In last post, we created Dashboards for Linux nodes monitoring. Please note, Linux and Windows are not only things which can be monitored but would leave that part to figure you out in case if you have any use case.
Let’s talk about creating a Windows summary dashboard this time like below one. It’s for just one node but it would keep on scaling as more nodes added in Prometheus target config.
Continue reading “Monitoring IT Infra with Prometheus and Grafana – Part 3”
Recently in pursuit of Open Source solution to monitor a stack of Jenkins and Team City nodes, I got chance to explore Prometheus and Grafana, which brought back all the fun, I used to have with CentOS and Open Source. That prompted me to write a step-by-step guide about setting up one.
Roughly 12 years back, I wrote a blog about Zabbix Monitoring when I was managing couple of data centres of a BPO in Delhi. In those days, I worked over a number of solutions over CentOS but later on in career, I got more engaged in Windows side of world. Microsoft Azure, O365 and more so Windows PowerShell and lost touch with such Open Source solutions for monitoring. But what better to resume the touch than Prometheus and Grafana.
Let’s go through introduction first, what is Prometheus? Some sci-fi movie title?
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud to meet requirements like a multi-dimensional data model, operational simplicity, scalable data collection, and a powerful query language, all in a single tool. The project was open-source from the beginning and began to be used by Boxever and Docker users as well, despite not being explicitly announced. Prometheus was inspired by the monitoring tool Borgmon used at Google. In May 2016, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation accepted Prometheus as its second incubated project, after Kubernetes. The blog post announcing this stated that the tool was in use at many companies including DigitalOcean, Ericsson, CoreOS, Weaveworks, Red Hat, and Google.
Second incubated project after Kubernetes? Impressive, no?
What about Grafana?
Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. A licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional capabilities is also available as a self-hosted installation or an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service. It is expandable through a plug-in system. End users can create complex monitoring dashboards using interactive query builders. Grafana is divided into a front end and back end, written in TypeScript and Go, respectively.
As a visualization tool, Grafana is a popular component in monitoring stacks, often used in combination with time series databases such as InfluxDB, Prometheus and Graphite; monitoring platforms such as Sensu, Icinga, Checkmk, Zabbix, Netdata, and PRTG; SIEMs such as Elasticsearch and Splunk; and other data sources.
Ok enough of introduction, let’s begin with steps to setup one. Continue reading “Monitoring IT Infra with Prometheus and Grafana – Part 1”
In line with the last post on File Server inventory, here comes the another script to perform patching for Domain Servers from a remote machine.
PowerShell already has methods to perform patching on any server, where we can list what all patches are available and create a downloader to download and install them all, but a limitation to the capability is, the same can not be done remotely. As a workaround for that, we would be creating schedule task on the remote machine via the script and performing the patching via triggering that schedule task.
It would involve two scripts InstallPatches.ps1 and PatchServer.ps1, whose code I would be listing below. It would make use of c:\temp directory and would be keeping logs and scripts in the same location. Also we would need any shared location, where we would keep a copy of InstallPatches.ps1, which then would be copied dynamically over the servers during patching. I have kept script source path as “\\ABCXYZ\sources\installpatches.ps1” while it can be changed as per your environment.
Continue reading “PowerShell: Script for patching Domain Servers remotely”
I am back again with just another write-up on WSUS in a very short time. Last time we talked about Reporting and Cleanup, this time its more into troubleshooting, which often requires one to find particular updates and nuke them out.
Yes! We are talking about those pesky Event IDs 364, which often mention about certain cab files and we System Admin bang their heads on walls to find out that which particular updates they belong to.
Let me give you an easy permanent way out via a Custom PowerShell module named PoshWSUS.
How to use that?
Continue reading “PowerShell: WSUS – Declining and Deleting updates based on keywords”
October 1, 2014, Nokia India launched three new Lumia’s to Indian market which would be available for purchase post October 15, 2014. Nokia Lumia 730 for affordable smartphone category at a price point of 15,299/-, Nokia Lumia 830 with a Carl Zeiss Pureview camera at a price point of 28, 000/- around and flagship Nokia Lumia 930 Pureview with metallic bezel at price point of 38,000/- around which would be available later.
With flood of phones in the market on almost weekly basis, it’s getting hard to differentiate for a brand. Brands have to re-think each time that which features they need to highlight for selling the new range of phones. This time, Nokia has branded their affordable Nokia Lumia 730 as Selfie phone.
Why Selfie?
Photography has came a long way ahead since the time when Nokia introduced the first camera phone to the world. The kind of challenges and requirements with camera phones kept on changing over time and so were the phone.
First it was about having easy access to a camera which is always with you to take a snap than dedicated camera, then the challenge moved ahead to compete with digital cameras and focus moved to quality of pictures along with the ease of use, then we moved ahead to cope with DSLR Cameras along with ease of use. At many occasions, people find that its good to use a smartphone to take pictures than a dedicated camera or DSLR considering the ease of use, easy to snap, easy to edit on the go and easy to share with the dedicated connectivity. What else one would be need from a photography solution?
But soon the next generations found the answer for “what else?” and the answer was “Selfie”. This always been a common complaint of many who love taking snaps that at the end of day, they find that though they might have taken thousands of snaps in a day, there are a few pictures in those including themselves as it’s not that convenient to give your phone to others and asking them to take the perfect pictures like you or of your choice. So answer was, why not take pictures of self? The use case became mainstream with usable resolution front cameras which started coming with new age smartphones as timer option was just not cutting it and taking a snap via back camera by guess work wasn’t giving perfect results every time.
Capable wide angle camera means one can take snaps of self and even of a big group including himself in it.
Nokia Lumia 730 : Polycarbonate Unibody build carries the legacy
Its hard to keep a differentiator about your phones when it comes to build due to rush of similar looking phones in the market and one should give full credit to Lumia series that they kept their designs unique through entire range. Not only design but material and durability also to go along.
Even though it might be at a lower price point with similar kind of base specs as Moto G next gen might have but the dual SIM offering of Nokia at affordable smartphone segment doesn’t looses its punch with 720p 4.7” CBD display along with ultrathin Corning Gorilla Glass 3. The camera might be of 6.7MP, but it Carl Zeiss optics which been known for being kind of best out there. While front and back both cameras can record at 1080p resolution, the battery at 2200mAh promises 22h of talktime and 600h of standby time.
Sure enough punches for the price point for the users which are not dedicatedly Android.
Nokia Lumia 830 : The first Pureview Phone without the camera bump
Even though the original Pureview definition of having a Super pixel created by heavy resolution camera compressed to few has changed over time, Pureview still stands for Carl Zeiss and quality pictures with it even though it wasn’t able to make phones very slimmer. Not any more.
Nokia Lumia 830 is just 8.5mm thick phone with 5” 720p IPS LCD screen weighing just 150g.. apparently the thinnest and lightest Lumia till date. A polycarbonate back along with metallic bezel for a phone which not only takes great night, low light pictures but also takes great wide angle selfies with 28mm front camera of 5MP capability.
The other differentiator with the phone was “Live Images”, which is a term for Nokia’s answer to HTC’s “zoe”. A photo which keeps moments in it like videos. I don’t really know how the describe it other way around.
If something was awkward with the phone then it would be the back cover which facilitates Wireless charging and all while made of polycarbonate material, it remains a pain in ass in case one needs to remove it for accessing battery/ storage / SIM etc.
The speaker continues to remain on the backside and single.
The no-bump Pureview camera on the back. The new about the camera is introduction of 3-Microphone system which claims to record true 5.1 Surround sound.
When it comes to Lumia series then apart from Windows Phone OS, the other differentiators are services, which Microsoft trying to push towards the end of spectrum till the lowest price points and the big step towards that this time is introductory offer of 1Tb Cloud Storage for six months and then on a cost of Rs150/- per month later on. The same cloud storage supposed to be available with any the new phones from now on.
This is definitely a Lumia which I would like to talk about more when it pays me a longer visit.
Nokia Lumia 930 : The flagship Pureview smartphone of Nokia talking metal
This was a surprise launch which wasn’t given hint about before the launch. The highest priced phone of the spectrum comes with the topmost of specs in entire range along with metallic build quality (reminding of iPhone 4S like bezel).
The specs include:
I didn’t had much hands on over the phone, so can’t say more..
1. Gionee Elife S5.5 – Time to move beyond biases and stereotypes
When you are reviewing an entirely new product about which you never knew anything before, nor you would have reviewed any sister product of it to understand part of things, then it becomes absolute necessary to give it undivided attention and comparatively longer period of use to understand the bottlenecks & possible issues that may start nagging over time. Because such issues can never been checked during two three weeks period as product remains comparatively new.
I should thank Gionee on this part that they allowed me to retain the unit for a longer while to understand it and to put it in real world use (I kind of forgotten that it’s a review unit and sure gonna miss it hard as it became part of life).
I remember the time when I was to review a keypad phone while my own phones been all touch phones. During entire period of review, I restricted myself to use the touch phone to feel the essence of living with that particular keypad phone. Same was the right thing to do when it was about an entirely new brand.
So how did Gionee Elife S5.5, which is sure a marvel on hardware front and head turner wherever I go, fared on software front? Did it performed at par with iPhone 5S or Nexus 4 which I had? Does it produce images worthy of 13MP camera? Does the battery sails through day? Does the glassy build survives in long run?
A number of questions which I intend to answer in the rest part of blog….
Continue reading “Gionee Elife S5.5-The Final part of review-Is the software part same impressive?”
Yes! Its again been long, since when I wrote last time, but I hope to make it up again with a detailed review of the product, about which I talked out in last blog post, the slimmest phone in the world right now, Gionee Elife S5.5. Slimness is obvious introduction, but trust me, this review would make you learn really a lot about the product and slimness would be just a little part of that.
Let’s know the brand first….
Brand Gionee: Preface
If we look at landscape of phones or more precisely smartphones, then sometimes it looks literally unbelievable that what has happened within less than a decade. We seen how less relevant conventional calls and messaging have gone in last decade, we seen how outdated non-touch phones became in a short period of time and we seen once towering personality of phones, the Nokia, going out from even top three manufacturers from once 80% market share. Same happened around prices of smartphones, which risen up with unbelievable rise in smartphone specs and crossed even cost\ capabilities of desktops even.
In high priced game of HTC, Samsung, Apple etc, players like Micromax, Karbonn, Xolo etc also tried their bit, but even if some of their products succeeded a bit or offered a valid alternative, the difference between premium products and their products was always visible even by single look at product. But then, Gionee entered into the market. Trust me, you need to read further and see this product in action to know why I feel a strong endorsement for this particular product. It definitely helped me in enlightening myself about the new players, the bright future ahead and I expect it would leave the same effect on you as well, that never write anything off, the landscape has changed in past and can change again.
Before starting the review, one should have a look at my earlier two posts 1 & 2 to have an idea about the company and why it galvanizes hope even in early interactions. This is a company, who entered in a market where “china” was literally synonym with duplicate, mediocre, unreliable etc (Might not be true for all in reality but the common perception) and rather than bending own ways to handle the market perception like many other competitors, decided to take it heads upon over itself to change the entire landscape.
Be it kind of products finishing/ logo etc, be it bold & unprecedented market strategies, be it kind of blogger interactions, be in unique Tier 1 retail relations, Gionee seems to be combining all the good parts of their competitors like Nokia, Apple, Samsung and Huawei into one and its definitely seem to be getting it right till now at least.
Continue reading “Gionee Elife S5.5 – Time to move beyond biases and stereotypes”
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