There are so many ways these days to start a local VM on the Mac that adding yet another one seems insane. And yet, Multipass from Canonical¹ appeals to me the most. Especially when it’s just a quick check that I need to make – it’s as simple as two commands and voilà, it’s working and ready to roll.

With the new version I really am looking forward for starting automatically the instance via multipass shell command – it’s safe to say that it was the only thing I was missing.

Please note that Multipass works solely with Ubuntu instances. It is cross-platform however and one can use it on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Last time I mentioned that I was working on a central syslog. Part of the task was also possibility to easily go through the logs, preferably with some filtering and what not. ELK-stack is usually the first thing mentioned as a potential solution. Essentially the goal is to land your logs in Elasticsearch. The problem with both of these solutions is on the processing part. With Logstash things can go very wrong very quickly and there’s only handful of other things than _grokparsefailure that can seriously put me into rage mode.

Grafana is one of my favourite Open Source software of all time. I’ve been using it for years and am thrilled to see yet another great major release. I’m really looking forward to put my hands on all new workflow called Explore. Currently it integrates with Loki, but support for Elasticsearch is already on the roadmap!

Franz is one of the first apps I install on a fresh Mac. Single window to handle pretty much any kind of communication service one can think of is superb. Best part that it’s also cross-platform.¹ 5.0.0 is a major release after years of development and 24 beta pre-releases (sic!).

Recently I’ve been tasked with creating a central syslog server. These are very useful when one maintain couple of boxes (or couple hundred and more) as it can provide a single point of checking out on what’s up with the machines. If it’s combined properly with metrics it serves as a super-boosting way of maintaining the overview of the entire infrastructure.

When it comes to NGINX, it defaults to storing log files in plain text. It’s a sane default and I don’t see a good reason to ship it in any other fashion. However, sometimes the needs change. It was the case for me – I’m using rsyslog¹ for all of the OS logs and it felt natural to me to have NGINX invited to join the party. As rsyslog client is pushing all of its logs further to the centralized server part already, I wanted to have NGINX logs included in the stream.