Blog

Many organizations often seek the services of a Managed Services provider to reduce the cost of IT operations. While a lower operating cost is one benefit, there are many, less obvious, benefits to leveraging a Managed Service that can bring tremendous value to commercial organizations. Recent studies indicate, while commercial...

In StackStorm a pack is logical organization that contains related actions, aliases, policies, rules and sensors. To get a good overview of what a pack is please see the excellent StackStorm Pack documentation. Most users of StackStorm wish to either integrate with a new system that’s not available in the...

When adding disks to VMware VM using Python we need to use the pyVmomi VMware SOAP API to communicate with vCenter. pyVmomi gives us a lot of very helpful features that take out a lot of the guess work in adding new disks to a VMware VM. You can install...

The following is a quick tutorial on using the ServiceNow API with python to programmatically create and update configuration items. A personal development instance of ServiceNow Jakarta was used for testing the code below. ServiceNow uses a REST Table API that allows users to perform create, read, update and delete...

A common request I have seen on the StackStorm Slack Channel is the ability to utilize 2-factor auth before executing a workflow. Users sometimes have very powerful workflows that require extra care, or a second set of eyes before executing. Inquiries are an experimental feature in StackStorm 2.5 (changelog) that...

We started playing around with StackStorm about 9 months ago just to try out some new tools. After a few months of playing around we realized that it was much more than a toy and could provide serious benefits to our DevOps team, our organization and to our customers. Before...

In this second installment of a two-part series, we’ll be going over Phase Two, the build out of standard pre- and post-patching automation, and Phase Three, the build out of application-specific pre- and post-patching automation. Click here for Phase One. With basic patching and reboots automated, a patching session for...

In this first installment of a two-part series, we’ll be going over Phase One, the build out of the “core” patching and reboot functionality on Ansible. Around a year ago, we began working with a customer whose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and 7 OS patching process was being...

Virtual Desktops are a topic that runs hot and cold through the enterprise space. Many enterprises begin pilots and projects in the space before building a clearly defined plan, and these are the environments that need additional remediation down the road. Before we start in with architecture, getting a firm...

This blog explains how we configured and use Grafana to graph and visualize PDU data stored in InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a time series database that we use to store dozens of metrics from all of our power distribution units (PDUs). This database is updated periodically with a python script that...