This guest blog post is from Rob Hirschfeld, Co-founder and CEO at RackN.
At RackN, a core design principle is that operations should be easy to track and troubleshoot. We work hard to automate provisioning with observable processes because insight into complex interactions within a modern data center is critical for success. So, it’s not helpful if we require complex technologies to understand where issues arise from disconnected processes. RackN and the open source Digital Rebar community require a simple, best in class solution to provide a better way to observe provisioning operations within our system without adding complexity and overhead.
Making infrastructure observable must not add complexity! The goal is highly transparent systems in operation, monitoring and analysis.
Honeycomb addresses that need with an innovative approach offering deep visibility into complex interactions within a distributed system. Honeycomb’s SaaS-based observability platform offers operators a variety of options for storing legacy data for comparisons, the ability to share data across team members, and trigger settings for alerts on key areas of focus.
Even better, the Honeycomb architecture easily receives JSON information from external systems which meant that we could simply publish our event data into their platform for immediate exploration with a simple plugin. This new plugin for Digital Rebar Provision sends all log and event data to a Honeycomb account without specialized configuration
I believe that when architectures are aligned, integrations become simple.
The integration effort took less than two hours between myself and a Honeycomb developer as the ability to pass structured JSON data via their APIs simplified the entire exchange. With the Golang libhoney API wrapper, the integration process was basically three lines of code!
// get the event object (e) from Digital Rebar Plugin ev := libhoney.NewEvent() defer ev.Send() ev.Add(e.Object);
The Digital Rebar plugin model (also Golang) has subscription functions that can receive all events generated. The code snippet above simply takes those events and sends them to Honeycomb.io after some simple initialization code (not included).
Consistently architected software using standards to exchange data leads to high quality outcomes for customers looking to deliver value from existing solutions.
The video below is a demonstration of this new offering for the Digital Rebar community including installation and usage. As you will see, Honeycomb adds substantial value without complexity and overhead.
To try the new Honeycomb plugin for Digital Rebar Provision, register for the 30-day trial providing access to the RackN Portal (SaaS) for management and operation of the provisioning tool.
More information on RackN and the Digital Rebar community:
RackN was founded by leading cloud innovators to change the economics of the data-center. Building upon their open source project, Digital Rebar, RackN is developing next generation infrastructure automation software for provisioning bare metal, VMs, clouds, and edges. Follow us at @rackngo and @digitalrebar.
