Sahil Suri, Author at The Linux Juggernaut

Using multitail utility to monitor log files

Posted by Sahil Suri | Apr 10, 2018 | Administration, Basics |

Introduction The ability to effectively understand and monitor log files is an important part of a system administrator or developer’s job responsibilities. Since, while working with Linux systems when services and applications do not function as intended the first and foremost task to look through the log files for diagnostic information that could help in troubleshooting the issue. We could you the cat command to open up the log file and print it to the terminal in its entirety but a large log file would be difficult to read if opened is this manner. If we need to view the oldest or most recent logs from a file, we could use the head and tail commands respectively. A more effective method of reading large log files would be to parse it through pagers more and less. But what if we need to monitor the log file for changes in real time? The inbuilt tail command has proven useful in this aspect by providing a -f option which allows users to monitor log files for changes/content as it gets appended to log file. But in order to monitor log files really effectively, we should consider using the multitail utility which is a free and open source tool developed to help users monitor their system log files. Given below are some of the features of multitail and why you should consider...

Using ansible-doc for accessing inbuilt documentation on ansible modules

Posted by Sahil Suri | Apr 4, 2018 | Ansible, Devops |

Introduction In our earlier articles on Ansible we introduced you to some basic concepts related to Ansible and explained how to install it and set up a basic environment to use. In a subsequent article, we explained the basics of the YAML markup language to help you understand playbook structure. In this article, we’ll focus on how to access and make the best use of Ansible documentation. If you search for documentation on Ansible modules online, you’ll find a number of places where thorough information about the modules is available. For the purpose of this post, we’ll be looking at the Ansible documentation that is available bundled with the distribution. We’ll show you how to list the modules that get installed when we install Ansible and also how to view more detailed information about a module. Ansible-doc To view documentation on Ansible modules, we use a command called ansible-doc. If you need to check the command line options available with the ansible-doc command, then you may simply type man ansible-doc Given below is a snippet from the man page showing the available options: --version show program's version number and exit -M, --module-path prepend colon-separated path(s) to module library (default=[u'/home/jenkins/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']) -a, --all For internal testing only Show documentation for all plugins. -h, --help show this help message and exit -l, --list List available plugins -s, --snippet Show playbook...

YAML: A quick introduction for working with Ansible

Posted by Sahil Suri | Apr 3, 2018 | Ansible |

Introduction The term “Human Readable Automation” is often associated with Ansible and is one of the major driving factors behind the exponential increase in its popularity over the last few years. YAML is used in conjunction with Ansible in the sense that it tells Ansible how to run complex deployments and apply configurations. It is a perfect candidate for Ansible playbooks because of its ease of creation and readability in a top-down manner used by Ansible for applying the configuration described in our playbook. Within Ansible, the playbook content is linear and not object-oriented like in some other deployment mechanisms. In this article, we will cover a basic introduction to YAML along with a couple of examples. Although a deep knowledge of YAML is not required for working with Ansible some basic knowledge of YAML syntax is helpful when writing Ansible playbooks to describe and apply our required configurations. What is YAML? During its initial development, YAML was reported to stand for “Yet AnotherMarkup Language”. However, once it was completed as a standard, that acronym was morphed into “YAML Ain’t Markup Language.” In short, YAML is meant to be a “human-readable data serialization format”. In other words, it’s meant for non-computers (us) to be able to read easily and recognize the significance of its content without complex translation applications. It was designed to be easy to map to...

Author: Sahil Suri

Using multitail utility to monitor log files

Using ansible-doc for accessing inbuilt documentation on ansible modules

YAML: A quick introduction for working with Ansible

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