network automation blog
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Monitor Ansible Automation Platform with Zabbix
The Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) system consists of numerous moving parts, where a lot can go wrong. The Event-Driven containers sometimes stop, jobs fail and I generally don’t want to access individual systems, like AAP, to check the status. What I want is alerts in Zabbix when a system is unhealthy, which is why I…
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Neovim with native plugin manager
I have recently been stripping down my Neovim configuration. My goal is to rely more on the built-in features in Neovim. This seems to be a good strategy, as the number of improvements and features organically replaces the plugins I was already using: Neovim 0.10 introduced commenting functionality, native LSP support was added in version…
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MariaDB tuning for Zabbix – part 2
Last year, I wrote a post about MariaDB tuning for Zabbix. My Zabbix environment has grown since then and is now a “Very large” deployment according to the Zabbix documentation. One of the issues you will run into in a large deployment is the housekeeping process, which is in charge of deleting old/expired data from…
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Neovim with native LSP
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) implementation in neovim 0.11.0 has been rewritten making it possible for mere mortals to rely on the native LSP capabilities within neovim. Here is an example: The vim.lsp.enable API tells neovim to auto-start the listed LSP’s based on the LSP configuration in ~/.config/nvim/lsp. In these examples, the LSP’s will be…
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Cisco Live San Diego distilled
Cisco Live 2025 San Diego, which I had the pleasure of attending, can be distilled into Observability and Agentic AI, which, in the context of Cisco, are both closely related to the acquisition of Splunk. Cloud native systems, like Netflix, have a distributed and complex architecture consisting of hundreds of microservices at a global scale.…
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Event-Driven Ansible with Zabbix
Zabbix supports Event-Driven Ansible. This makes it possible to launch job_templates in Ansible Automation Platform based on triggers in Zabbix. One use case is to update host events in Zabbix with facts from Ansible, which we will take a look at in this post. Ansible Automation Platform You will need various credentials, a decision environment…
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Gitlab CI/CD for Ansible inventory
The inventory is your source of truth in Ansible. It contains all your hosts along with data about your hosts. The data from the inventory represents the desired state you want to reach with Ansible and is used to overwrite arguments (defaults) in roles and playbooks. You can build your inventory statically, using dynamic inventory…
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MariaDB tuning for Zabbix
I have a Zabbix server with 40GB of memory that requires around 700 new values per second. The server runs MariaDB 11.4 in a standard LAMP-stack and I use MySQLTuner-perl to tune the database. Here is how. Enable the following configuration in /etc/my.cnf.d/mariadb_server.cnf Restart MariaDB: Let the server run for some time and then execute…
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MariaDB 10.5 to 11.4 upgrade
I recently upgraded MariaDB from version 10.5 to 11.4 for a couple of RHEL9 servers. Here are the steps I used: Add the MariaDB repo containing version 11.4 and exclude MariaDB 10.5 from the system default AppStream repository. Uninstall MariaDB 10.5 and install version 11.4: Create socket: Start and enable MariaDB: Run the upgrade script:…
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Useful Linux commands
Command Comment $ sudo su – Get root privileges and load the root user’s environment. $ sudo !! Repeat the last command with sudo privileges. $ printenv Prints all environment variables. $ ssh-copy-id example Use locally available keys to authorize logins on a remote machine. $ ssh-keygen -R example Remove a host entry from the…