Etcd, ZooKeeper, Consul, and similar programs are currently the subject of heated debate in the world of configuration management. We investigate the problems they seek to solve and promises they make.
Ansible offers automatic provisioning and configuration capabilities similar to that of Chef and Puppet, but it's aimed more at admins than developers.
Automating your system builds can save a lot of time. We describe the steps of a minimal installation using CentOS and Kickstart.
DevOps makes IT departments more efficient and makes their employees happier – but what is it? We describe some basic ingredients of the DevOps recipe.
Puppet and Chef are competing open source tools for configuration management. Which tool is right for your network? Read on for some pros and cons.
If you want to manage large IT environments efficiently, you need automation. In this article, we describe how to transfer information automatically from the OCS network inventory system to the OpenNMS network monitoring tool.
Four open source tools – Vagrant, Serf, Packer, and Consul – facilitate a developer's work by each handling one specific task elegantly.
Collectd 4.3 is a comprehensive monitoring tool with a removable plugin architecture.
Rex doesn't need agents or a special language to describe the tasks it performs on remote computers.
Although Nagios gets lots of attention, the popular network monitoring tool Zabbix is free, can configure hosts for direct monitoring in the web interface, and now can also monitor VMware machines in version 2.2.
