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 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-...

The Ansible community is massive, so it is no surprise that version 2.9 came out with more than 3600 modules. This number keeps growing and it is motivating a change in how modules are distributed in the future. To read more about these changes you can read from Jeff Geerling himself However sometimes still you will come across with either: some functionality that hasn't been implemented on a module or a target for which there are no modules What do you do then? You have a few options: create your own module. This can be done in Python and even if you are not a Python guru you can find many tutorials that don't look intimidating at all you use the "shell" or "command" modules to run some other script if your target can be managed through a REST API then you can use the "uri" module REST API's are the basis for many automation tasks nowadays. An advantage of building automation through the API is that the workflow you build...

My colleague (and fellow Avenger) Andrew Vella has a strong developer background with experience on SaaS offerings, so when we came up with the idea of using Service Now to drive our Ansible playbooks he was very quick to put this hand up. This combination of Ansible and ServiceNow is an integration that we see many customers trying to build. Ansible's growth is phenomenal and is quickly sticking out above other Configuration Management competitors. ServiceNow is also dominating his market Andrew has promised to share his learnings in a blog when time allows. But in the meantime I can explain that he: created a developer instance in ServiceNow. This is free and you can keep it active as long as you don't forget to use it at least every 10 days installed the mid server inside the datacenter created a custom catalog with entries and an approval workflow configured REST API calls to trigger playbooks that are stored in AWX (the community version of Ansible Tower) mad...

Traditionally, if you wanted code against a REST API your first point of call was the reference guide. This is typically a  several hundred page PDF document (the largest I have seen was 850 page). Sometimes it is hard to navigate and more often than not it requires you to jump a lot between different parts of the document to find how to format the "body" of a POST request. This is part of the reason I worked on Project Vision and leveraged Postman's ability to export/import collections. This can be a very . You can read more about Project Vision here: http://anzpiper.blogspot.com/2019/12/postman-collections-for-dellemc-block.html Postman is by no means unique. Nowadays it is more common to see tools that allow you explore API's in a more friendly and interactive way. One great option is Swagger. I work for DellEMC and I see the trend where new products are coming with Swagger UI packaged, which is nice to see ... just to clarify, this is usually in addition to th...

In a  previous post I introduced Project Vision, which is a set of Postman collections for DellEMC storage arrays. I have now recorded a short video and uploaded it to Youtube so that you can get an idea of how it works and what API calls are covered. Enjoy! ***Update 17-June-2020 - A new Postman collection has been added for PowerStore https://github.com/cermegno/Project-Vision

In the previous article  I explained that the configuration management ecosystem and the automation in general is too crowded and dynamic and it is easy to make the wrong decision that can be costly in the long term. In my opinion, one tool is emerging as the winner above the rest, and that tool is Ansible. It is no surprise that more and more modules are being released to manage other aspects of the IT infrastructure including on-prem hardware. One example of that is PowerMax/VMAX which got its first release in June 2019. This first version covers all the basics of storage provisioning including snapshots https://github.com/dell/ansible-powermax It leverages the popular PyU4V python library  which wraps the REST API that lives in Unisphere. The library provides way more functionality than that, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see more versions in the near future that provide more functionality. The “Product Guide” document in the “docs” folder of the DellEMC repo prov...