logstash

Some weeks ago, I wrote a post detailing how to send JMX metrics from a Spring Boot app to Elasticsearch by developing another Spring Boot app. Getting to create such an app is not always the right idea but developers are makers - software makers, and developing new apps is quite alluring to them. However, in the overall scheme of things, this means time is not only spent in development, but also for maintenance during the entire lifetime of the app.

Last week, I wrote about how one could start developing one’s Logstash plugin coming from a Java developer background. However, with the acquisition of Packetbeat, Logstash now has help from Beats to push data to Elasticsearch. Beats are developed in Go, another challenge for traditional Java developers. This week, I tried porting my Logstash Reddit plugin to a dedicated Beat. This post documents my findings (spoiler: I found it much easier than with Ruby).

I recently became interested in Logstash, and after playing with it for a while, I decided to create my own custom plugin for learning purpose. I chose to pull data from Reddit because a) I use it often and b) there’s no existing plugin that offers that.

Given the trend around microservices, it has become mandatory to be able to follow a transaction across multiple microservices. Spring Cloud Sleuth is such a distributed tracing system fully integrated into the Spring Boot ecosystem. By adding the spring-cloud-starter-sleuth into a project’s POM, it instantly becomes Sleuth-enabled and every standard log call automatically adds additional data, such as spanId and traceId to the usual data. 2016-11-25 19:05:53.

As a Java developer, when you are first shown how to run the JVM in debug mode, attach to it and then set a breakpoint, you really feel like you’ve reached a step on your developer journey. Well, at least I did. Now the world is going full microservice and knowing that trick means less and less in it everyday.