Linkedin published a new version of their iOS app today and it has a feature that I am going to use *a lot* at meetings, VMUGs, conferences… I think it might even revitalise my use of Linkedin. It’s profile QR codes. I heard about it through Engadget.
Basically if you click the QR icon in the search bar in the main screen, it allows you to display a QR code with link to your profile that others can scan. Or you can scan other QR codes. Since Apple now has easy QR scanning in the camera app (just point camera at any QR code), this is a great tool that is going to save me a lot of business cards and scanning in other cards.
My Linkedin profile QR code
Of course you want to make sure to update your contact details and visibility, I added for instance Blue Medora’s product matrix….
At Blue Medora we still have a very popular plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor Postgres databases. With the number of customers moving to Postgres or supporting dual database environments on the rise, it is important to give the DBA the opportunity to keep monitoring his environment from his existing monitoring platform. The plugin integrates in the OEM dashboards and gives you a lot of details on Postgres.
OEM Postgres plugin query overview
Last year we upgraded the software to support Postgres databases running on AWS RDS, now at the request of several customers we upgraded to support postgres v10. We also have trial versions available now!
All technical info is on our support site and more product info is – as always – in the product matrix. Please contact sales@bluemedora.com if you are interested in testing the product.
Good news if you saw the announcement of VMware vRealize Operations v6.7 yesterday. We worked hard with VMware so that all our management packs are ready for use with this new version! The capacity planning engine has been overhauled a lot, so we wrote a KB article to explain the differences.
HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard
Blue Medora product management have published a partial list of latest versions to use. These also include other updates. The list is not complete yet, but more will follow. For a documentation and data sheets see the product matrix and contact sales there for a demo and trial or email sales@bluemedora.com.
The driving force in IT for me has always been commoditization. There is probably another blog post here, but we moved from the Bios to the processor, to storage and the network. Everything becomes a commodity at some point, or do you still care what BIOS version your server has? If you still have a server?
In 2008 I attended a CloudCamp where people were asking vendors: “but how do I move workloads between cloud providers?”. Of course there was no answer because public cloud was not a commodity back then, it was just an emerging tech and they all wanted to monetize. Compare your AWS prices from back then to now if you don’t believe me…
Today I realize that containers are making cloud a commodity finally. It does not matter if you run your Docker containers in AWS or Azure or other cloud services. The apps and services remain the same. With Docker Enterprise Edition – the vCenter of Docker – you can manage them all from one pane. I realized that even more with the announcement of IBM Cloud support in Docker EE in the keynote this morning. So now you have AWS, Azure and IBM cloud support built-in for your swarm clusters (and soon kubernetes). Google cloud is experimental at the moment I understand. I played around with Docker for Mac CE deploying a swarm to AWS and I must say the experience is seemless.
So there you go: when all your apps run in containers, they can be moved around on different clouds or even run on different ones in one stack!
So where is the ‘spiel’ now you ask? In added services from those cloud providers. IBM showed in the keynote adding image recognition and Watson lookup in a traditional pet store app. Watson, Alexa and the likes are the proprietary differentiators now. For a next blog…
The MySQL management pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager is one of the most populair ones at Blue Medora. It gives you monitoring of your MySQL 5.6.x and 5.7.x databases -including queries – and capaciteit planning, right Inside vROps. The latest release of vRealize Operations MP for MySQL is now generally available. https://bluemedora.com/downloads/vrops_mp_for_mysql
As with all Blue Medora management packs, the dashboard above shows you that we detect all relations from the database to the VM and beyond. Notable Features in this Release Include: • Implemented overall performance improvements and query optimization • Removed MySQL on OS, MySQL IOPS, MySQL on VM, and MySQL Top-N Queries Dashboards • Added MySQL Usage, MySQL Query Analysis, and MySQL on VMware Dashboards • Removed Memory Capacity for MySQL instances • Added new Views and Reports
As with all new releases it includes the great new HTML Documentation.
Important! With this product we have implemented the new versioning scheme, which removes the “6.x” signifier tied to the minimum supported vROps version. The official build number for this release that will be listed in our documentation is 2.0.0.20170719.200055
• Version number: ◦ “2” is the major version. ◦ “0” is the minor version. ◦ “0” is the patch version. • Build number: ◦ “20170719” is the build date (YYYYMMDD). ◦ “200055” is the build time (hhmmss).
After 30 odd years in IT it still amazes me people will not take care of basic protection in their environments. Security settings, patches, anti-virus. Nope. Even after previous ransomware attacks this one is still successful. Even in big corporations.
And please don’t go the “it won’t happen on my Mac/ Linux/ TRS-80 machines” way. You know it is coming … Some environments are more secure like Mac OS with sandbox and just not running Windows file sharing, but attacks are more and more ingenious. Even your Intel processor has built-in risks and it takes just a link in an email. Yes I know you were just curious about that viagra ad and did not really intended to order…
Get some basic discipline and IT-hygiene ! That is the real issue.
Overnight Blue Medora released some great new and improved management packs for VMware vRealize Operations Manager. As always the advantages include full API support – no agents to install – relationships detection across solutions and some great dashboards to get you started included with every solution.
This is an important new release since VMware decided to drop support for Windows remote collectors in vRealize Operations v6.5. Updates Include (from release notes):
Removed Windows Collector requirement for PowerShell metric retrieval (i.e., session latency metrics; not applicable to XenDesktop versions 7.5 and below)
Added support for WinRM HTTPS
Renamed Citrix XenDesktop Relationships dashboard to Citrix XenDesktop Health Investigation
Combined Application Details and Desktop Details dashboards into single Citrix XenDesktop App and Desktop Details dashboard
JBoss and Tomcat are new products, inline with our expanding True Visibility Suite offering, to monitor your application servers in the full stack. Key Features include (from release notes):
4 comprehensive monitoring dashboards, including:
JBoss EAP Overview
JBoss EAP Environment Overview
JBoss EAP Server
JBoss EAP Virtual Machine Viewer
Nearly 150 collected metrics for JBoss EAP resources
Key performance metrics such as average response time, active connection count, wait count, percent in use, and active sessions
Detailed alerts when symptoms arise for high JVM usage, datasource wait count/active connections, servlet processing time, and more
See documentation for further details and installation. JBoss EAP is licensed per Application Server – or as part of the TVS Enterprise suite – and is supported on Enterprise Edition of vRealize Operations.
200+ collected metrics for Apache Tomcat resources
Key performance metrics such as average response time, active connection count, wait count, percent in use, and active sessions
Detailed alerts when symptoms arise for high servlet load time, datasource/session manager active sessions, cache hit count, and more
vRealize Calculated Memory, Cache, Threading, and Session Manager capacity definitions for Apache Tomcat resources
See documentation for further details and installation. Apache Tomcat is licensed per Webserver – or as part of the TVS Enterprise suite – and is supported on Enterprise Edition of vRealize Operations.
