Jon couldn’t make it for this episode again, however he should be back next time!

Jerry mentions that he is using NetData, for monitoring his own infrastructure and also for his clients. He mentions how it can be used as a Prometheus Exporter, as a standalone package, and also has a Cloud/SaaS offering.

He mentions how it can pick up services automatically (if Netdata supports them – Integrations). RPM-based packages are available in EPEL and a third-party Debian repository (more information here).

Jerry mentions that it can run effectively as an agent to send metrics back to Netdata Cloud, which is different from how Prometheus has worked traditionally.

Stuart mentions that Prometheus are now adding a new feature called Agent mode. This is to solve the issue of needing to get access to Prometheus on a site, without necessarily wanting to open up every site in firewalls/security groups or running VPNs.

Jerry mentions issues he’s having with Let’s Encrypt currently, with Apache Virtual Hosts, specifically in how to automate it with Ansible.

Stuart mentions moving away from using Apache and starting to use Caddy, as he moving to using containers for deploying his publicly available services. Caddy comes out of the box with Let’s Encrypt support, removing one of the challenges in automation.

He also uses Traefik at home, as not everything is container-based and Traefik makes a mixed environment quite straightforward to use. Traefik is more complex than Caddy, but does have some extra features that Stuart makes use of.

Jerry mentions Dehydrated, a BASH implementation of an ACME server (what Let’s Encrypt is based upon).

Stuart mentions that he has been overhauling his home infrastructure. His aim was to move to using Git to define his infrastructure more, rather than the mixture of some configuration management, some adhoc, some scripts, with no consistency.

He mentions using Gitea for source control, and finding the awesome-gitea repository for what can be used alongside Gitea. He mentions using Drone for continuous integration, which has allowed him to move most tasks from manually-triggered to triggered on changes in his Git repositories.

He has put a series of posts on his blog about it here: –

• Introduction
• Moving to Ansible Roles
• SaltStack improvements
• Getting started with Drone CI

More posts on this are still to come!

Jerry asks about running Drone agents on something like Spot Instances or Spot Virtual Machines.

A discussion was had around our preferences on using an Open Source product with great documentation or a Commerial offering/SaaS with a support contract.

Stuart brought up the example of running something like Prometheus for monitoring (i.e. running a monitoring stack yourself) compared to something like Datadog that runs the monitoring stack for you.

Jerry mentions it is entirely dependent upon the service.

Stuart mentions that it can be nice to look through code to see where an issue might be that you are facing (and even contributing fixes).