Tag Archives: docker-compose

04 Jan

Observium pollers vertical scaling

Observium in containers

There are several free monitoring tools available for commercial or non-commercial use. I decided to use Observium to monitor my home and remote labs. I had no specific requirements except that it had to have an option to run in Docker containers on RaspberryPi (ARMv6/8 CPUs). The downside of all monitoring solutions are the resource requirements. There are three resources that matter – storage, memory, and CPUs. Vertical scaling of Observium pollers and other processes is one of the solutions if your hardware resources are limited.

The vertical scaling means adding more workers doing the same process in parallel, but tasks assigned to each process should not overlap. In my case, I wanted to spread the polling across my RaspberryPi cluster. Polling process can consume the CPU and make RaspberriPi unresponsible. In worst scenario, if you have many devices or you are poling lots of data from your devices the polling processes may not finish their work within 5 minutes (this is how often devices have to be queried) so you will miss some data. You may of course tune number of threads the polling process start but any platform has it resources limitations you cannot bypass.  

In this article I will present my solution based on Docker Swarm cluster. It has some limitations and downsides but may work for many people, not only on RaspberyPi.

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20 Aug

Run Jenkins in the ​container

Jenkins and Docker - flexible environment

The more you work with automation, the more you will like the containers. They fit and scale correctly in CI/CD model and can be easily managed. The whole infrastructure for automation should be flexible, easy to maintain and extendable – containers fit perfectly into this model. So why not start from putting Jenkins in the container?

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05 Jul

Repository with Docker templates

Don't be afraid​ of the source code

Everyone who worked on any project knows that sites like GitHub, GitLab or StackOverflow are full of open-source examples, functions, issue solutions and so on. I used them as well. It is not obligatory, but I feel that it is fair if I share something I create that may be useful for others. After all, I know what I was looking for in the past. No matter if we are creating Python script, the Java application or Docker templates.

I decided to create a small project called the DockerTemplates. The repository contains at the moment docker-compose files for various products I set up using Docker containers. I prefer using the docker-compose for everything even project consists only of one container. I find it the easiest way to maintain a consistent approach across multiple systems or projects. You will find the docker-compose configuration files in folders named after the application. In each folder, there is a separate documentation of what are the configuration details implemented in each file.

The initial release of this repository contains configuration files for following applications:

  • AWX
  • Jenkins
  • GitLab-CE

The repository will accept pull requests for any registered GitLab user so it is easy to participate and put your configuration. Please check requirements described in CONTRIBUTING.md guideline. You can also email files directly to me or leave a comment.

26 Apr

Container names and docker-compose

This post is related to Docker and automation

You learn new things every day. Quite often by accident because something is not working as you expect or it just stopped working. This is one of those situations where I learned to be careful how to use container names using docker-compose and how containers refer to each other names. This is very important if they share the same network.

To perform some tests I created a lab where I run Ansible AWX (the free Ansible Tower version) and Netbox IPAM. I decided to use docker-compose because it gave me an easy way to manage the lab. By default, both AWX and Netbox is put in dedicated Network just for the containers of each installation. This means the isolation – the desired way you want to run containers. But in my lab, AWX need to talk to Netbox API to pull inventory. Because it is my lab I did the simplest thing.

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