ANZ Pied Piper

In this previous article we discussed how to leverage PowerStore's powerful API to collect audit logs and send them to a Syslog server . We used Logstash to do that because of its extensive list of plugins Sometimes I come across organizations that still have a requirement to send storage array Alerts to SNMP. As in the Syslog case, ultimately most modern monitoring tools today support collecting information via REST API because that's the way the application world is going, i.e. the cloud native way ... it would be fun to see Prometheus monitoring Kubernetes via SNMP :) However there is still some requirement out there for SNMP traps, so we will explore how to do it. For simplicity we will use the same toolset that we used in the previous article. I encourage you to revisit quickly the article as we did an extensive introduction to Logstash, with practical examples as well as a description of the logs available in PowerStore. I won't cover those aspects in this article I ...

In today's article I wanted to share some work I have been doing recently, specifically a prototype for an on-prem Storage-as-a-Service with DellEMC PowerStore A few years ago we used to hear a lot the "we have a cloud-first policy" and this of course meant "public cloud". The promise of lower cost pay-per use, self-service and automated IT consumption attracted many customers. Many of these organizations discovered the hard way that the financial aspect of it was not exactly "low cost". Public cloud makes solid sense for a bursty application but your average workload can typically run on-prem for up to 50% less However the self-service and automated IT consumption capabilities changed everyone's perspective of how IT resources should be consumed. Organizations nowadays expect that capability on-prem as well. If they succeed in getting it they will have the best of both worlds: empower the end users, operational efficiency and financial savings The...

In this article we will explore how to get the logs from a DellEMC PowerStore array to a Syslog server. For this purpose we will use the PowerStore’s REST API, which is a great piece of engineering and a joy to work with as a developer. If you want to learn more about the PowerStore REST API I strongly recommend you quickly skim through the 2 articles I have written about the REST API. Part 1 - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/intro-to-dellemc-powerstore-rest-api.html Part 2 - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/powerstore-rest-api-best-practices.html In particular the second article demonstrates the capabilities of the REST API query language. This is a great feature I will use heavily in the last section so I strongly recommend you read that one at least As a side note, Syslog was developed in 1980. So this year it has turn 40 years old! That is a long time by any measure ... many of my colleagues were not even born in 1980. But in the technology scale it looks even scarier. 198...

Today we live in a world powered by REST APIs. And when it comes to REST API’s, PowerStore’s is fantastic. Why? An important thing to understand is that PowerStore is a REST API first system, which means all functionality that is exposed externally has been made available through the API. This also means that other interfaces such as the CLI or the GUI are in fact consumers of the REST API. This is the second part of a a recent blog post and a video I published explaining some of the most important features of the PowerStore REST API. Blog - http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2020/08/intro-to-dellemc-powerstore-rest-api.html Video -  https://youtu.be/xMzKUuTasWY?list=PL_zWoydWWqp4AfdYNkTkAxCvr5tGl9JzR In this article we will use Postman to show you how to query the API. Postman is a great tool to explore REST API’s and can be downloaded for free The Postman collection for PowerStore that I am going to show in this article can be found in https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision Project...

I recently recorded a video introducing the PowerStore REST API. The API in PowerStore is great. It is very comprehensive and addresses all management aspects of the array Documentation for the API is available through Swagger UI. But if you like the old fashioned API reference guide, you can also get it here The video shows also how authentication works and the advanced request parameters, which allows developers to perform powerful queries with the REST API The demo uses a Postman collection from Project Vision. You can get this and other collections for other DellEMC products from this GitHub repo: https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision I hope you enjoy the video

In today's article I wanted to introduce a video I have been working with some of my colleagues from the IaC Avengers team. We had done some work with Service Now before, in terms of custom catalogs and even approval workflows. You can refer to this article to see the details What we had never done is to manage resources in more than one location. The Avengers team has a strong presence both in Australia and in Singapore, so we decided to create a solution such that from a single Service Now developer instance we could manage resources in both of our datacenters. As explained in previous articles this requires the developer instance to be able to reach out the internal infrastructure. This can be potentially a tough task due to firewalls and other security measures standing on the way. For that purpose Service Now provide the Mid server . This is a very clever piece of software that will run on either Linux of Windows and allow Service Now outgoing API calls to reach your on-...

Kubernetes can be hard work. The success of distributions like Openshift, Rancher or PKS is due to the promise of making it easier. Still a large part of the user base (in fact this still has the largest market share of any on-prem Kubernetes distro) choose to deploy plain vanilla Kubernetes to take advantage of the super fast-paced innovation However this is usually a path that leads to long hours trying to figure how to make things work and overcome many problems. This is painful even though the community out there is massive. With this in mind one of my colleagues ( Deepak Waghmare ) took upon himself the task of simplifying and streamlining some of these tasks as much as possible. He created an Ansible collection with several roles. This collection is now published in Galaxy The collection is primarily aiming at the the simplification of the installation of the CSI driver in DellEMC storage arrays. All these arrays follow the same pattern by using Helm, so with a littl...

Today I will be discussing the details and artefacts of Project Vision. This new Avengers' project leverages Postman's import collection capabilities to provide sample API calls. For more details about the IaC Avengers initiative you can read this other article: http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2019/12/confiure-vxflex-scaleio-api-with-python.html This first release Project Vision provides API examples for the following products: PowerMax XtremIO Unity PowerFlex/VxFlex (formerly ScaleIO) PowerStore - Added in June 2020 PowerOne - Added in June 2020 VPLEX - Added in June 2020 - Courtesy of Ankur Patel The goal of the project is to help customers of these products to automate day 1 and day 2 operations by looking at handy examples. API reference guides can sometimes be many hundred pages long and take considerable effort to understand. So by looking at some of the most common operational examples one can kickstart coding efforts. Each collection has been built to pro...