Dimensigon

A game-changer in Cloud Era

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Why should I learn about Dimensigon “DM”?

If you are an IT Professional with focus on Cloud and Automation. You will find DM very useful and it can improve not only your day-to-day but your whole company.

Would you be the first to implement it inside your company or not?

It does not require previous automation knowledge, of course the best background is when you have basics of Linux and you have a basic understanding of Cloud components.

If you like administering using a Command Line Interface (CLI), you will love DM.

Specially, if you are DBA, it would be a powertool for you because DM has been created by Database Experts.

Important to note, if you already excel an automation technology, DM will help you amplify your potential.

For this Hands-On practical tutorial, you will use your own Cloud Infrastructure.

We recommend Scaleway Cloud (“SCW”) as it is the simplest to operate.

If you are looking for similar examples with Google Cloud or AWS, we will add them in the “Advanced” section later but you can contact us at any time for guidance.

In total, if you want to perform the tutorial quick, you will not expend more than 5 Euros and you will have a lot of fun. If you want to play with the infrastructure more time, we find this way of practice fair as you pay for your infrastructure and you can decide what to do.

Sometimes we have offers and we can invite you at our own expense. Contact us to check whether we have Cloud credits for your practices or not. Have fun and learn a lot!

Create your Scaleway account

This should be easy:

Go to https://console.scaleway.com/register
Fill your First and Last name, Email address.
Check the reCAPTCHA.
You will charged 2 Euros but they will return it afterwards to check your card validity.
And we are ready to go.

Add your public SSH Key to Scaleway Credentials

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Create your first and only manual Server

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Log-in and let's configure the Scaleway CLI

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Manual example to create a server with SCW CLI

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Server creation + Startup Script

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Let's configure Dimensigon, our First-Node

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Server creation + Startup Script + Manual JOIN

Putting things together, now we create a server using Dimensigon but we will do a “manual join” to teach you how a manual join works.

Now automated join with DM

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Server creation + Startup Script

Putting things together, now we create a server using Dimensigon but we will do a “manual join” to teach you how a manual join works.

Using Software Library (SW Lib)

One main disadvantage of most automations technology is that you should have all necessary things available, locally, in order to run the automation.

At Dimensigon, we have designed DM to forget about where the software is and you can place it on-the-fly at target directory and continue your software installation.

This is because we have suffered many times the problem to upload software to machines with restricted network, to request a NFS Share to another IT Colleagues or to have kind of a software library locally to run different automations.

Software Library is a easy way to register a Software that is somewhere in our network and place it wherever we need on demand to continue our orchestration (automation).

Add / Register Software

Sample Text – Tutorial

Test a Software "Send"

Sample Text – Tutorial

Pro Tip

Meanwhile the software is transferring, you can monitor the transaction via “transfer” command with DShell and this monitoring can be integrated to a GUI of your choice as Dimensigon DM is fully RESTful.

In case you have not used a “foreground” SEND and the software might be still transferring, use:

dshell> transfer list --last

Pro Tip

As you have seen, DShell is the CLI interface for Dimensigon but all request you are doing with DShell, they are making RESTful calls in the background, if you want to integrate DM in your company, it is easy and it makes your company very powerful to trigger whatever you want company-wide (if you allow it by privileges of course)

Log Federation (LogFed)

If you are installing a software in 30 nodes, you may not want to connect SSH to 30 nodes or wait for the automation to finish in 30 nodes to know the result.

Sometimes it is interesting to centralize some logs to the machine you usually connect to administrate your company (aka management server , jump server, etc).

If you are part of a huge multinational company, you might want to centralize by region, EMEA, APAC, etc.

Example use case, I want to deploy 30 Database servers but I am interested to check the main log meanwhile they are being created and/or after they have been created.

In this way, if anything fails during or after my automation, I can have in place an ELK or Log Analysis tool that it will raise an alert for me or I can simply have a multitail to grep for errors in 30 different logs, so I can see quickly the problem and have a wide overview from the comfort of my favorite server.

Subscribe to a log or whole directory

You can subscribe to a single file, usually a log file or to a whole directory, as well, you can specify recursive for a directory.

This can be used in the middle of an orchestration via POST or as a standalone command.

Unsubscribe

You can unsubscribe at any time from a log or directory by doing the following command.

Pro Tip

If you feel confident, you can include LogFed as part of your orchestration already to monitor “on-the-fly” what is going on, locally from a N number of servers.

For example, if you are using Oracle Database, you would like to see the “alert log” real-time when you are creating a Oracle RAC of N number of nodes. In case you are using Tibero Database, the “sys.log” would be of your interest in case of Tibero TAC creation or while making an automated switchover.