Filesystem events to Elasticsearch / Kibana through Kafka Connect / Kafka

Filesystem events are useful to monitor. They can indicate a security breach. They can also help  understanding how a complex system works by looking at the files it reads and writes.

When monitoring events, you can expect a lot of data to be generated quickly. The events might be interesting to process for different systems and at a different pace. Also it would be nice if you could replay events from the start or a specific moment. Enter Kafka. In order to put the filesystem events in Kafka (from an output file), the Kafka Connect FileSourceConnector is used. In order to get the data from Kafka to Elasticsearch, the Kafka Connect ElasticsearchSinkConnector is used. Both connectors can be used without Enterprise license.

Minikube on KVM on Linux Mint 19.1

In a previous blog post I wrote about running Minikube on Windows. I ended with the suggestion that getting Minikube working might be much easier on Linux. Thus I installed Linux Mint (as dual-boot) on my laptop and gave it a shot. The steps I took to get it working are described here.

Some challenges with Oracle Reports 12.2.1.3

Oracle Reports has been around for a long time and future versions will most likely not be created  (see here). Hence this is going to be my first and also last blog post on this product. Installing Reports is not an easy task. It requires several steps which are not well documented. This blog post contains a few pointers. The main source of inspiration is here.

Minikube on Windows. Hyper-V vs Vagrant/VirtualBox

Kubernetes is a system for running and coordinating containerized applications across a cluster of machines. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster and can be used for local development. In this blog post I'll compare 2 different ways to get a working Minikube environment on Windows based on experience with a workshop which we've created. One based on using Vagrant and VirtualBox (in which an Ubuntu environment is created) and one which uses Hyper-V (and an out of the box Minikube Linux distribution running on top). Do mind that many of the things in this blog post are a personal opinion.