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Code / Examples / Monitoring / Tutorials

Custom File Check for Datadog Agents

One of the greatest things I’ve found about Datadog agent is it’s extensible nature.  While there are numerous OOB integrations, we often find an edge case or two that require some quick code and a custom check here and there. This is a pretty basic check that looks to see if a file exists and if it does, reports a successful check, and if not, reports a check error tagged with the particular filename.  Additionally, if the file does exist,   file.age  and  file.modified  metrics are reported back also tagged by filename.  Handy for knowing if certain files exist and how old they may be....

Linux Shell 0

Code / Examples / Monitoring

Custom Shell Check for Datadog Agents

One of the greatest things I’ve found about Datadog agent is it’s extensible nature.  While there are numerous OOB integrations, we often find an edge case or two that require some quick code and a custom check here and there. This is one that had previously been put up in one of the repos but I found that as the agent had updated, this check to run shell commands and retrieve metrics relied on some code that was included with the agent that changed over some revisions. So… I re-wrote this to operate as a standalone. This check allows you to run...

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APIs / Big Data / Presentations / Random / Thoughts

Enabling Real-time Analytics with FPGAs

With the rise of Analytics and Big Data and our need to collect, process, and distribute ever-growing amounts of data from IoT, to mapping, and insights on the way consumers interact across apps and the internet, fast, efficient, and effective methods of analyzing our data are becoming more necessary.   To date, platforms like Hadoop, Cloudera, Apache Pig, Dryad, SciDB, etc have served us in a fair capacity; however, the ability to process the vast amounts of data we collect in real time or while data is “in-motion” has left much to be desired.  Surprisingly, the goal of much faster processing capability...

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Random / Thoughts

The Death of Innovation By The Way Things Are

I think we’ve all heard it before: “That’s just the way it is”, or “That’s the “, or “Change here is too hard”.  These statements abound throughout just about every industry I’ve been in or sold into.  I see this daily across multiple organizations that may define themselves as “innovative” or “forward-thinking”, but just looking at those statements sure doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies about innovation within most organizations.  It’s disheartening to say the least because in order to get better, faster, and more competitive… we must innovate!  Let’s take a look at this to understand why these kinds of thinking will...

Microservices Primer 0

APIs / Code / DevOps / Microservices

Microservices Primer

Microservices!  I’m sure we’ve all heard that fancy new term bouncing around all over the web and spilling from the mouths of our executive overlords on a regular basis, but what is it really? Another dive into the darkness of SOA, more ESBs, something fancy sounding, but really just idealistic? No my friends, it is none of these things.  It’s something far better that a) can be attained, and b) will help your organization and applications thrive and flourish.  We’ll go through a quick primer and help you get to a minimum understanding of Microservices and where to go next! The Current...

API Caching 1

APIs / Presentations / Tutorials

Using A Cache to Reduce Your API Response Time

I’d like to post yet another presentation surrounding API Management.  This time I’ve focused on using a cache as a method to reduce your response time for your APIs and improve speed and performance resulting in a much better user experience for your developers! Knowing why and when to use a cache is exceedingly important should you choose to go this route. Misuse of caching technology in order to replace a data-store or over cache can actually hinder performance and result in unintended consequences such as loss of data.  Proper use however can result in wonderful speed increases and drastically...

Securing Your APIs 1

APIs / Code / Tutorials

Best Practices for Securing Your APIs

I’d like to share a presentation I’ve put together on some best practices for securing your APIs.  This presentation covers everything from encryption, to UUIDs, the differences between authentication and authorization, OAuth and OpenID Connect, and a host of other information around SSL, TLS, and more ways you can secure your APIs from those pesky would-be hackers. Much has been said around securing APIs and fortunately people do try to implement some of these practices.  Unfortunately, most do not implement multiple legged security thereby relying solely on a single measure or two simplistic and easy-to-defeat mechanisms to secure their APIs.  Alas, some...

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APIs / Code

Why you should use UUIDs in your APIs

I’d like to take a moment to dwell on using UUIDs (Universally unique identifier) in your APIs, the good and the bad, and really why you should use them.  Today we’ll focus around using these specifically as resource identifiers where we will, for the purposes of this blog post, think of a resources as items like users, groups, etc.  So without further ado… let’s take a look at UUIDs and why a good API should take advantage of them. What is a UUID? For time’s sake, let’s just go ahead and quote the Wikipedia definition of a UUID as it will serve...

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APIs / Examples / Tutorials

API Modeling and Design with Hypermedia

I’d like to share a presentation I’ve created on API Modeling and Design created for the TRI-REST API Meet Up in my role as a Principle Consultant for CA Technologies API Management team.  In this presentation I explore the concepts of adding contextual and actionable information to APIs through Hypermedia types including JSON-LD, HAL, and Collection+JSON. I will also be giving this presentation October 6th, 2015 at the DC Web API Meet Up should you like to attend.  There’s typically pizza and tasty adult beverages for those of you who are able to join! A very special thanks goes out to my friends...