Did I tell you I really like my new Synology Nas DS1815+? Guess I did already 🙂
Kinston Value Ram ( DDR3 so-dimm 1600mhz CL11 4GB )
Today I went to one of my favorite computer stores (Paradigit in Maastricht) to pickup some extra memory for my nas. As the Synology is only packed with 2GB of ram this will not be enough if you want to add a SSD cache disk. DSM tells me it will need a additional 3GB of ram before I can use a SSD disk as cache storage. But why adding SSD?
Well, there are two reasons. First, just because I can and secondly,  I really like the Netapp Flash Pool feature which is able to serve “hot data” faster as it is cached on the SSD disk. As we all know SSD’s are really fast when it comes to reading, and thus, serving data. The memory upgrade is the first step before I can use the SSD caching mechanism. Secondly I will wait a few weeks before putting in the SSD. Since the Nas is fairly new, all currently copied data is seen as “hot data” which is of course not true. I will give the Nas 3 weeks so it can figure out what the real “hot data” is (and because I’m a real gentleman when it comes to treating my hardware right 🙂 )
We have been to Cuba for our honeymoon in 2011. We both had a wish we would like to experience Cuba before Castro would die. Not because we think new people would ruin this beautiful island, but because Castro belongs to the 50’s and 60’s rebels that fought for their country. Although we disliked the overall anxiety of our guide, we did fall in love with this country. Especially for you, a guitar acapella that sums up Cuba. La Comparsa 🙂
A few weeks a go I finally received my  Synology DS1815+ Nas. Although I always have used my ZFS loving Freenas setup, I really think these kinda, factory made ready solutions, are going to takeover the Nas communities.
With ease I was able to setup my home and business storage. Thanks to DSM (which is OS of course) it is dead simple to add shares, sync with multiple clouds, and add iscsi luns to my systems with a blink of my eye.
As promised. I have released the dashboard code on Github. Please remember! This is my initial commit so bugs are included. As for myself, I’m not a programmer but more a graphical designer and I hope someone will enhance the code.
Zabbix is great! Since I’ve worked with a lot of Monitoring systems (including HPOM, NNMi, Nagios, Zenoss and Cacti to name a few) Zabbix struck me with it’s Enterprise ready features. It totally fulfills all the needs my employer (and me) wants from a Monitoring system.
All needs??? Mmmm, almost all!
There is one feature I really miss in Zabbix and that’s a decent dashboard function. Yeah, the default dashboard (or screens / slideshows) are great but only for technicians. What I was looking for was a Dashboard that does explain things in a overview without being too technical.
Was I lost? Not really! In comes the Zabbix api!!
We have managed to create a dashboard function using the Zabbix api and php which creates a nice overview of things that are happening in our environment. Although I am not a programmer (I am more a front end developer) we’ve managed (thanks Don!) to create something nice (in my opinion)
Zabbix Alternative Dashboard
What does it do I hear you asking?
Well, it does this and that, but let me summarize it:
It’s build with php.
It queries a Host Group (via a read only user access) and checks it’s active triggers
 If none of it’s trigger are fired, the host is probably ‘ok’ and will be shown in bright green on the dashboard
If a trigger gets fired, the color and/or size are adjusted
Using jquery and masonry javascripts hosts are aligned on the dashboard.
And much more,…
Soon I will publish a second post which will be more “in detail”. Second, I’m going to post the files onto Github so everyone can use/adjust/fork the files.
