Apr 16, 2020
Apr 16, 2020

A quick and dirty way to monitor data arriving on Kafka

I’ve been poking around recently with capturing Wi-Fi packet data and streaming it into Apache Kafka, from where I’m processing and analysing it. Kafka itself is rock-solid - because I’m using ☁️Confluent Cloud and someone else worries about provisioning it, scaling it, and keeping it running for me. But whilst Kafka works just great, my side of the setup—tshark running on a Raspberry Pi—is less than stable. For whatever reason it sometimes stalls and I have to restart the Raspberry Pi and restart the capture process.

Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020

Adventures in the Cloud, Part 94: ECS

My name’s Robin, and I’m a Developer Advocate. What that means in part is that I build a ton of demos, and Docker Compose is my jam. I love using Docker Compose for the same reasons that many people do:

  • Spin up and tear down fully-functioning multi-component environments with ease. No bespoke builds, no cloning of VMs to preserve "that magic state where everything works"

  • Repeatability. It’s the same each time.

  • Portability. I can point someone at a docker-compose.yml that I’ve written and they can run the same on their machine with the same results almost guaranteed.

Dec 20, 2019
Dec 20, 2019

Analysing network behaviour with ksqlDB and MongoDB

In this post I want to build on my previous one and show another use of the Syslog data that I’m capturing. Instead of looking for SSH attacks, I’m going to analyse the behaviour of my networking components. Note You can find all the code to run this on GitHub. Getting Syslog data into Kafka As before, let’s create ourselves a syslog connector in ksqlDB: CREATE SOURCE CONNECTOR SOURCE_SYSLOG_UDP_01 WITH ( 'tasks.
Dec 18, 2019
Dec 18, 2019

Detecting and Analysing SSH Attacks with ksqlDB

I’ve written previously about ingesting Syslog into Kafka and using KSQL to analyse it. I want to revisit the subject since it’s nearly two years since I wrote about it and some things have changed since then. ksqlDB now includes the ability to define connectors from within it, which makes setting things up loads easier. You can find the full rig to run this on GitHub. Create and configure the Syslog connector To start with, create a source connector:
Nov 29, 2019
Nov 29, 2019

Kafka Connect - Request timed out

A short & sweet blog post to help people Googling for this error, and me next time I encounter it.

The scenario: trying to create a connector in Kafka Connect (running in distributed mode, one worker) failed with the curl response

HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 14:33:53 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 48
Server: Jetty(9.4.18.v20190429)

{"error_code":500,"message":"Request timed out"}
Aug 9, 2019
Aug 9, 2019

Resetting a Consumer Group in Kafka

I’ve been using Replicator as a powerful way to copy data from my Kafka rig at home onto my laptop’s Kafka environment. It means that when I’m on the road I can continue to work with the same set of data and develop pipelines etc. With a VPN back home I can even keep them in sync directly if I want to. I hit a problem the other day where Replicator was running, but I had no data in my target topics on my laptop.