Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2020

Solving critical Windows services restart during Puppet agent upgrades

In this blog we’ll share the journey we went on to solve a not-so-easy customer problem: a critical Windows services restart during Puppet agent upgrades. As with most software fixes, it starts with a customer ticket: component DHCP Server service restarts after an upgrade. This troubleshooting journey goes from analyzing Windows installer logs, to using undocumented Windows API calls, and back to the Windows installer logs, until we eventually found a solution.

Reading and resolving Puppet errors

When Puppet shows up red, don't panic! You need to figure out what's causing the error, so you can understand whether it's something fixable, or an actual bug. Generally, the first error in a Puppet run is the one you need to concern yourself with. Once the first thing fails, others that run after it or require it to succeed will also fail and could produce a LOT of red text! So scroll to the first red error on your Puppet run.

VictorOps and Relay for Incident Response

VictorOps is an incident response tool whose mission is straightforward: “To make being on call suck less.” It enables teams to quickly detect and respond to problems like a service degredation or outage. VictorOps supports a wide range of external integrations to extend its capabilities by connecting different parts of your DevOps toolchain.

New Gartner Report: How to lead digital disruption with programmable infrastructure

A hybrid infrastructure strategy is integral in creating a successful digital transformation in your enterprise. Programmable infrastructure (PI), or Infrastructure as Code, makes these strategies work in the real world. This blog will cover some highlights from the Gartner Report on why I&O leaders must adopt programmable infrastructure to enhance customer-focused agility.

Scaling CD Platforms in the Enterprise Through Self-Service

The concept of Continuous Delivery (CD) has been around for over a decade. Early adopters of CD have reaped the benefits of reduced cycle times coupled with greater stability and reliability. Yet CD is far from a “solved problem” with many organizations struggling to implement CD at scale (or at all!) due to organizational, process and technology challenges.

Deploying Puppet Enterprise agents with HashiCorp Terraform on Azure VMs

HashiCorp Terraform is an open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that is widely used to deploy cloud infrastructure in the public cloud, such as AWS and Azure, along with on-premises VMware vSphere environments. One of the challenges is developing a method for bootstrapping the instances with configuration management agents such as the Puppet Enterprise agent.