NewRelic Server Monitor for Amazon Elastic Beanstalk application
September 27, 2014 | | Tags : AWS NewRelic Monitoring Elastic Beanstalk
Recently we moved our web applications to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk platform. To monitor our running instances we decided to try NewRelic Server Monitoring. How to install and configure applications on Windows platform was not an issue - this is fully described in the AWS documentation. The problem was that by default right after the installation of NewRelic agent, it was reporting home the server’s hostname which in the case of Elastic Beanstalk was the same for all instances! Plus just a random windows server name wouldn’t be the most convenient way to tell which server data you’re looking at the moment. I discovered that NewRelic agent could be started with a -host parameter, which allows to pass any string to be used as a hostname in the agent’s communication with the base. In turn, this value is stored in the registry and when it is modified, and the agent service is restarted, the new host name is used.
Read moreGenerating Enums from the database tables using T4 templates in Visual Studio
October 31, 2012 | | Tags : SQL Tools Scripts T4
Many if not all database projects use lookup tables. This enforces database normalization, saves space, allows application-side caching, and many other nice and useful things. But now you have to teach the application which value of this lookup has which meaning. Also you need to make sure that after the lookup table has been updated, or records have been added or deleted from it, the application knows about these changes. But if we use just numeric values in the application, this makes the task to keep app in sync with the database more difficult if not impossible if the project is too large.
So somewhere heard about using Enums. This makes the task much simpler, as I only need to keep the enum definition in sync with the database lookup table. Great, but is there a way to keep the lookups automatically in sync with the database?
I came across this great article: Generate enum from a database lookup table using T4
I wanted to automate the enum creation as much as possible. With Microsoft SQL Server I can use extended properties to provide instructions to the application how to generate the enums.
Read moreSQL Server script to generate passwords
May 14, 2012 | | Tags : SQL Tools Scripts
As a DBA and partially a sysadmin, I quite often need to create strong passwords. While there are many tools available, they are not necessarily installed on my desktop, but SSMS is. So to simplify my life I wrote this simple script to generate passwords with each symbol appear in the password one time only. I haven’t built any additional checks to make sure that uses all types of symbols in the password (i.e. letters, numbers and special characters), but if the password looks not so strong, I can always rerun the script.
Read moreFixing unresponsive management ports on MD3000i
April 9, 2012 | | Tags : SAN MD3000i Dell
A few years ago we bought an entry level SAN MD3000i from Dell. It has been a great product for the money we paid for it, and it works pretty well. However once in a while we have issues with the controller management ports - they just plain stop responding. Dell is helpless, all of the firmware is current, but the issue keeps reappearing. Usually this only affects one port, but recently we had to fail the switches over and both management ports stopped responding. Data ports are stable. First I tried to disable and reenable the ports on the switch hoping that it will reset the controller ports, but I had no luck.
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