Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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Article
· Jul 25, 2019 1m read
Disabling an Ensemble Production

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

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I wanted to write it as a comment to article of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.

Image result for docker clean all images

I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it. I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.

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· Jul 12, 2019 2m read
Basic Database Metrics example

This is a self contained class that can be run from the Intersystems Task Scheduler which records peak usage details for databases and licenses built up throughout the day and retaining 30 days history.

To schedule the task to run every hour:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule()

You can also specify your own start time, stop time, and run interval:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule(startTime, stopTime, intervalMins)

Metrics are stored in ^Metrics in the namespace that the class resides in/is run from.

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? Certainly more than typing a post.

Please check out my "Coding talks" on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

1. Analysing InterSystems IRIS System Performance with Yape. Part 1: Installing Yape

Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

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Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures. Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.

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InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

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Continuing on with providing some examples of various storage technologies and their performance profiles, this time we looked at the growing trend of leveraging internal commodity-based server storage, specifically the new HPE Cloudline 3150 Gen10 AMD processor-based single socket servers with two 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a NVMe drives.

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This post provides useful links and an overview of best practice configuration for low latency storage IO by creating LVM Physical Extent (PE) stripes for database disks on InterSystems Data Platforms; InterSystems IRIS, Caché, and Ensemble.

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In old Caché versions it was possible to create a new role based on predefined %Developer by copying it and adding some resources as needed. It was true at least from 2010.1 to 2015.1.

After upgrade from 2015.1.4 to 2017.2.1 it turned that it's only partially true now. User with a "New-Developer" role can enter Studio and open existing cls/mac/etc for editing and everything is OK unless he tries to create something new (Ctrl-N), than he gets a pop-up with %msg: <User xxx does not have enough privilege to execute stored procedure %CSP.StudioTemplateMgr_Templates>

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InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

I this article we'll discuss:

  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • Connecting your environments to GitLab
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I wanted to see some alerts that occur in my Productions in a Mobile Device, I came across Pushover.net recently that although has an upfront cost $5 you can send as many messages as you like after that, there is a 7 day free trial to check it out.

To Integrate this with a production I did the following.

Create an account and set up a device on https://pushover.net/

Record the following API Keys from the web site on the main page you will see

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

  • GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
  • Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

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Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab WorkFlow
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

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This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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Article
· Sep 28, 2017 1m read
Terminal license expire message

If you are facing out the license expire warning message on your terminal ("*** Warning: This Cache license will expire in 3 days ***") and you do not want that message to be displayed, you can disable/enable that by rinning the following commands:

Do ExpirationMessageOff^%SYS.LICENSE - Disable

Do ExpirationMessageOn^%SYS.LICENSE - Enable

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Article
· Jun 12, 2017 1m read
Setting the Windows service account

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

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Article
· Dec 15, 2016 1m read
Version history for the production class

Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. ​

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.

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