In the last few projects that I’ve attended, I was deeply involved in continuous integration. What I mean is that I was either fully in charge of setting up, configuring and maintaining CI or I was a consultant, helping other teams to deal with different problems related to this subject. All projects have been using TeamCity as a platform for continuous integration. It has a lot of predefined jobs that facilitate most common activities necessary to build pipelines, as well as rich UI that helps to easily configure it and examine pipeline results. ... Read More

In the early days of dotnet core, there was an attempt of changing the C# project file format. The old “csproj” based on XML format was replaced with .xproj/project.json. However, after releasing dotnet core 1.0 the authors decided to get back to XML file. The format stayed the same but the specification went through a major change. With the new schema, a lot of improvements come into .net development and they are not restricted only to dotnet core projects. ... Read More

It’s been over a year since I’ve started using ELK stack for logging purpose. In the meantime, I was able to successfully introduce it in a few development teams, totally changing the way we are working with application logs. Everything is working fine and the only downside so far was the need for periodical maintenance work. By maintenance, I mean removing old indices. If the disk free space drops below certain level the ElasticSearch stops working correctly. ... Read More

A few months ago I published “Demystifying ELK stack” article that summarizes my knowledge about setting up and configuring the system for collecting, processing and presenting logs, based on Filebeat, Logstash, Kibana, and Elasticsearch. Since then I’ve learned a few new DevOps things which help me and my teammates to work more effectively with ELK. I think they’re worth sharing.

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Have you ever been in a situation when you discovered an exception in the logs that forced you to spend the next couple of minutes - or even hours - figuring out what exactly went wrong? The message was very cryptic and the only useful information that guided you to the crime scene was a stack trace. And after arriving there, you still had no idea what had really happened and what was the culprit. ... Read More