A collection of nerdy things done in nerdy ways to break, fix, and learn technology
You have likely heard the news that VMworld 2022 is now VMware Explore 2022. That’s 6 different events across the word that kick off with VMware Explore US in late August 2022 followed by events in Brazil (October), Europe, Singapore, Japan, and China (all in November). Regardless of your feeling about the change, consider this…
VMware’s Knowledge Base site is a powerful search engine for finding information, but the way you choose to use it is important. A general search is one thing, but what if you could keep track of changes to knowledge base articles and get notified when new ones are created based on a specific product area…
Before my first VMworld experience in 2017, I was completely overwhelmed with how to spend my time at the conference. With so many activities happening, how do you decide? Despite this being a virtual event yet again, I want to provide a framework for attendees to make the most out of this year’s conference. Regardless…
I recently learned VMware has an open source project for chaos engineering called Mangle, and I thought it would be fun to do a little exploring. After all, the name sounds pretty cool, and I know almost nothing about chaos engineering. So let’s create a little chaos, shall we? This will be the first in…
This is part 7 of my quest to explore Azure Functions for self-education in functions-as-a-service. The goal of this post is to successfully instrument an Azure function for OpenTracing to visualize the function call inside Tanzu Observability (AKA Wavefront). Back in part 1, we explored Azure Functions and Function Apps via the Azure portal. In part 2 we…
I see an empty conference center where VMworld once sat. If you’ve never attended VMworld in person, it’s a completely overwhelming experience for the first time attendee. Now that it’s virtual and free to attend, it’s more accessible to us all. But it can still be overwhelming. I wanted to take a few minutes to…
This is part 6 of my quest to explore Azure Functions for self-education in functions-as-a-service. The goal of this post is to successfully integrate VMware’s Tanzu Observability (AKA Wavefront) with Azure and explore the additional insights gained for our Azure Function environment. Back in part 1, we explored Azure Functions and Function Apps via the Azure…
What happens when you have an idea for a conference talk but don’t have the technical expertise to back it up? And what if you think the things you plan to do with certain technologies can be done but aren’t 100% certain? Do you submit anyway and risk failure or just save the idea for…
Several months ago I started building a guide to using VMware documentation that was first a single blog post, launched into a blog series, and then morphed into a presentation at the Boston VMUG UserCon in September 2019. I realized while preparing that there was a better way to organize the content and a number…
Thus far in our series, we’ve successfully shipped pihole.log lines to a Wavefront proxy in AWS EC2 and verified the proxy’s receipt of the logs. No data from the logs is being passed to Wavefront just yet, so it’s time to take a deeper look at the log contents and extract some data to be…