You can see the sample code for this post on Github.

Consul Watches offer a way to hook into changes to the Consul cluster state at runtime.The specific type of changes we will be looking at hooking into in this post are checks. Whenever a node or service comes online and registers to Consul, whenever an existing node or service leaves Consul, or whenever an existing node or service becomes unresponsive, Consul will emit a check event. This check event can invoke a process to monitor the health of our services, alerting human being that action might soon be necessary.

The source code for this blog post can be found on GitHub.

Consul can run in either client or server mode. As far as Consul is concerned, the primary difference between client and server mode are that Consul Servers participate in the consensus quorum, store cluster state, and handle queries. Consul Agents are often deployed to act as middle-men between the services and the Consul Servers, which need to be highly available by design.

You can view the sample code associated with this post on GitHub.

In a previous post on Provisioning a Server with Kibana, we saw that it’s very straightforward to get kibana on a box.

The corresponding source code for this post is available on GitHub.

Kibana is a fancy pants web application that tries to make data in Elasticsearch user-friendly. Rounding out the previous two posts on how to install an elasticsearch cluster and how to install multiple logstash hosts, I will now show you how to stack kibana on top of them.

You can see the sample code for this tutorial on GitHub.

 Molecule is primarily a way to manage the testing of infrastructure automation code. At its core, it wraps around various providers like Vagrant, Docker, or VMWare, and provides relatively simple integration with testing providers, notably TestInfra. Molecule is a great tool, but in my opinion there are not enough resources, by way of examples, to provide an adequate getting started guide. This post is meant to help fill that void.