I have written another post for the Loggly blog — all about our guidelines for choosing and integrating open-source software and technology in your next project.
Check it out here.
All posts by Philip O'Toole
If you love your logs, set them free
Monitoring Storm Kafka Spouts using Python
When running a large real-time processing system, monitoring is critical. But it does more than allow you to keep an eye on your system. During development it allows you test hypotheses about how it works, how it performs when certain parameters are changed, and takes the guessing out of working with dynamic systems.
Storm, a real-time computational framework open-sourced by Twitter, is such a system and comes with a Spout, allowing messages to be streamed from a Kafka Broker.
Boost ASIO timers — errors are never enough
The Boost ASIO Library is a wonderful piece of software. I’ve built high-performance event-driven IO C++ programs that just scream — it works very well. However, there is one subtlety when it comes to timers — specifically when it comes to cancelling expired timers.
Continue reading Boost ASIO timers — errors are never enough
Bootstrapping Cassandra
Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database, informally known as a NoSQL database. It is designed to store large amounts of data, offer high-write performance, and provide fault-tolerance. I recently needed some hands-on experience with Cassandra, and being relatively new to Java programming, needed a simple set-up with which I would experiment.
Generating Type-1 UUIDs using C++
I needed some C++ code to generate Type-1 time-based UUIDs. The Boost libraries, while offering support for other types, don’t have support for time-based UUIDs.
A cut of my code can be found in github.
mutt and Google Mail
I finally moved to mutt for my Loggly e-mail (which runs on Google Mail). After moving from e-mail client to e-mail client, I was keen to give it a try — the minimalist design and speed really appealed.
It took a little while to get it just right, but it’s up and running now. I’m pretty happy with it so far, and might consider using it for my personal Yahoo! Mail.
You can find my .muttrc file here.
New Challenges
After almost 5 years at Riverbed Technology, it’s time for new challenges. I’ve started a new development position at Loggly in San Francisco, helping to build their Cloud-based Logging-as-a-Service platform.
I spent significant time at building systems that needed comprehensive logging support. But it’s something that developers don’t need to worry about — let others do it for you.
Why not check out Loggly for your logging and monitoring needs? And if you like building scalable, distributed, software systems, why not join us?
Eating your own dogfood
Dogfood testing is an effective way to increase testing, and get valuable feedback, on one’s products. It can be especially effective in the earlier stages of a product’s development, when the user base can be small. Having a forgiving — and sometimes captive — audience provides very useful feedback.
I just wrote a post for the Riverbed Blog about Dogfood testing during development of the Riverbed Cloud Portal. You can check it out here.
My experience with