Apache NiFi: Monitoring metrics and provenance events using Azure Log Analytics

There are several cases where you might want to use Azure Log Analytics to monitor your NiFi instances. An obvious one is when NiFi is running in Azure. Azure Log Analytics can also be used as single monitoring/alerting solution for multiple applications making operations easier by providing a single interface for this. You might want this if you want to monitor business processes which span multiple applications and you want to monitor the entire process to for example identify bottlenecks.

In this blog post I'll show you how easy it is to achieve this using the AzureLogAnalyticsReportingTask and the AzureLogAnalyticsProvenanceReportingTask from NiFi and what you need to configure in Azure Log Analytics to make this work.

Oracle Service Bus: Pipeline alerts in Splunk using SNMP traps

Oracle Service Bus provides a reporting activity called Alert. The OSB pipeline alerts use a persistent store. This store is file based. Changing the persistent store to JDBC based, does not cause pipeline alerts to be stored in a database instead of on disk. When the persistent store on disk becomes large, opening pipeline alerts in the Enterprise Manager (12c) or Service Bus console (11g) can suffer from poor performance. If you put an archive setting on pipeline alerts (see here), the space from the persistent store on disk is not reduced when alerts get deleted. You can compact the store to reduce space (see here), but this requires the store to be offline and this might require shutting down the Service Bus. This can be cumbersome to do often and is not good for your availability.

If you do not want to use the EM / SB console or have the issues with the filestore, there is an alternative. Pipeline alerts can produce SNMP traps. SNMP traps can be forwarded by a WebLogic SNMP Agent to an SNMP Manager. This manager can store the SNMP traps in a file and Splunk can monitor the file. Splunk makes searching alerts and visualizing them easy. In this blog I will describe the steps needed to get a minimal setup with SNMP traps going and how to see the pipeline alerts in Splunk.