After two introduction blogs on Apache Kafka (ie. Apache Kafka Concepts by Example and Apache Kafka Consumer Group), it is time to discover the wide ecosystem around it. In this blog post, I will play with ksqlDB, streams and tables. ksqlDB ksqlDB is a server that takes benefit of an Apache Kafka infrastructure for real time data streaming. It can be used to capture events (via, for example, Kafka Connect), transform events, expose views (or tables). Starting ksqlDB server is easy. First, we need to set the bootstrap servers of our Kafka cluster in etc/ksqldb/ksql-server.properties file: boo ..read more

Zabbix allows to create complex web monitoring scenario and gather metrics about it. In this blog post, we will see how to assess that we are able to login to M-Files web application and, to not consume too many licenses, to logout. Login In my “M-Files by Zabbix agent active” template, I create a new scenario named “Login/Logout” where I define two variables: On the left side, it is the name of the variable which be used in any parameters of the web request (Headers, Steps). On the right, it is a template MACRO which can then be set at host level. Next, I go in Steps tab and add the Login st ..read more

In my previous blog post, I presented you how to create a load testing scenario based on a recorder. While working on it, I faced small problems that required few fixes which were very repetitive (and you know I love to automate as much as possible ). Amount the issues I faced, there were: Extending a scenario with extra actions Update a scenario as a new version of the application is behaving differently (different HTTP POST data and HTTP results) In this blog post, we will improve the existing load test scenario for M-Files. Extend a Scenario When extending a scenario, the HTTP requests w ..read more

So far, for Zabbix monitoring, I only covered Linux based servers. We can put aside MS-SQL which was monitored via ODBC, thus without any Zabbix agent involved. In this blog post, I will explain you how I was able to monitor a Document Manage System (DMS) like M-Files which is running on Windows. By the way, Vincent did a great blog post about M-Files overview. Zabbix Agent Installation Installation is straight forward as it consist as simple MSI file, so no need to spend too much time if there are no specific needs beside setting up agent in active mode (Zabbix agent pushes data to Zabbix ser ..read more

In this blog post, I will show you how to gather metrics from a OpenTelemetry interface from a Zabbix server and how to display Zabbix data in Grafana. Why Should I do that? First, you might wonder why should you even do that? Dashboards capabilities of Zabbix are nice and evolving but is not as complete and customizable as Grafana can be. Thus, Grafana is still the best choice for interactive visualization. Also, many applications provide metrics in open telemetry format out-of-the-box, so being able to get metrics into Zabbix server for computation and storage would be nice. It can also be p ..read more

When working with any ECM solution, you will have to manage a rendition software. This is used to transform the native documents from most formats (docx, pptx, xlsx, txt, jpeg, png, svg, etc.) into another format (pdf, png, etc.). The rendition can then be used for a multitude of use-cases: thumbnails, previsualization purposes online/in a browser, for security/conformity to certain standards, for workflows like sending the PDF version to your customers, annotations, etc… Most ECM will come with it out-of-the-box (usually with no additional costs) while others will provide the necessary archit ..read more

A typical web application architecture with a load balancer, two application servers and a database looks like this: If you run a JMeter, or any load test tool, from one unique server or workstation, the load balancer will most likely route all traffic to only one of the application servers. Why is that? Mainly because the load balancer uses the incoming IP (the IP of the workstation) as the key to maintain sticky session. Thus, this way of testing application will not be valid compared to real user traffic. Fortunately, JMeter support remote testing. This will make connection coming from dif ..read more

Writing an Apache JMeter scenario is not an easy task. Debugging a scenario is even harder. One might think that JMeter is simply recording some browser actions and that’s it, and you are good to go for a load test. This could be valid if the scenario does not require any login. When it does require login, there will be some dynamic results to parse with the help of regular expressions. RegExp is very powerful and you can find plenty of web sites to test a regular expression against a text. No Match When there are multiple matches, for example a list of choices in your webapp, you might want t ..read more

In this blog post, we will quickly see what is required to monitor a Microsoft SQL Server with Zabbix. Agent Setup Agent setup is not required by MSSQL by ODBC template; thus this step can be skipped. Setup Monitoring Account The best practice is to create an account in the database dedicated to monitoring which will have limited permissions (view, select). Setup chapter of MS SQL integration on Zabbix web site explains it well. In our example, this user will be named zbx_monitor. ODBC Driver Linux Zabbix server will trigger SQL queries directly against MS SQL Server. To achieve this, it requi ..read more

The aim of that blog is to look into Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) error when setting up for APEX. This is following some experience at a customer who wanted to move to latest version of ORDS with APEX 23.1, in late 2023, and ran into an issue. If you have encountered similar error when trying to run ORDS 23.x standalone for APEX 23.1 you will find a resolution and more details in this blog: Context – APEX 21.3 is installed first on Oracle DB 19.16 – ORDS 23.3 is installed on Oracle Linux 8 from the package provided by Oracle ($ORDS_CONFIG=/etc/ords/config and $ORDS_BASE=/usr/local/bin) OR ..read more