Winter is coming! Winter time has already arrived, and soon the Corona Lockdown aswell. Sitting at home in the warmth with a cup of tea, having a complete overview of the IT is a good feeling. The catchword here is “complete”. I don’t rely on traditional blackbox monitoring solutions1 but rather on the whitebox solution called Prometheus2. Behind Prometheus there is no single company but an initiative of various ones. The who-is-who of the tech industry with RedHat, Amazon, Apple, ARM and many others3. Of course Prometheus comes with a free licence and is completely open-source. Read more

I’ve started using Apache-Exporter1 for monitoring and checking this weekend how useful it is and how it can be integrated into my Prometheus2 monitoring enviroment. The server-status requests inevitably lead to more “background noise” in the Apache logfiles. The screenshot below clearly shows in the upper less section: Of course the requests cannot be prevented, but you can manipulate what Apache writes in its logfiles. It’s called conditional logging and allows you to set variables with SetEnvIf3 to any regex on each request. With SetEnvIfExpr it is even possible to perform expressions4, for instance to check if a request comes from your inside network segments: Read more