The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic agent that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data — metrics, traces, and logs — from instrumented applications. Running a standalone Collector on RHEL 9 decouples your application code from the observability backend, making it easy to route data to multiple destinations or swap backends without redeploying services. This guide […]
Podman pods mirror the Kubernetes pod concept — a group of containers that share the same network namespace, IPC namespace, and optionally storage volumes. This makes it straightforward to move workloads between a local RHEL 9 machine and a Kubernetes cluster with minimal changes. In this tutorial you will create a pod containing an Nginx […]
A private Docker registry allows organisations to store and distribute container images internally, without relying on Docker Hub or a cloud registry. This is essential for teams working with proprietary application images that cannot be stored in public registries, organisations with strict data sovereignty requirements, and environments with limited internet access. Docker provides an official […]
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It stores data as JSON documents in indices and provides near-real-time full-text search, log aggregation, metrics analysis, and complex aggregation queries through a simple HTTP/JSON API. Elasticsearch is the core component of the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) — Elasticsearch stores and searches […]
Python virtual environments solve a fundamental dependency management problem: different projects require different versions of the same library, and installing everything system-wide leads to version conflicts. A virtual environment is a self-contained directory containing a Python interpreter copy and a site-packages directory isolated from the system Python. Each project gets its own virtual environment with […]
Ceph is a highly scalable, self-healing distributed storage platform that provides object, block, and file storage from a single cluster. On RHEL 9, cephadm is the recommended deployment tool for the Reef release, using containers and SSH to bootstrap and manage cluster daemons without manual RPM installations. This tutorial covers deploying a basic Ceph cluster […]
GitLab CI/CD is GitLab’s built-in continuous integration and delivery system that automatically runs pipelines when code is pushed to a repository. Unlike Jenkins (which requires a separate server and complex plugin configuration), GitLab CI/CD is fully integrated with the GitLab platform — pipelines are defined in a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the repository root and run […]
Swap space acts as overflow memory. When the physical RAM is full, the Linux kernel moves the least-recently-used memory pages to swap on disk, freeing physical RAM for active processes. Without swap, when RAM is exhausted the Out of Memory (OOM) killer terminates processes — often the largest one, which is frequently your database or […]
Terminal multiplexing solves one of the most common problems in server administration: when your SSH connection drops mid-task, any running process in that session is killed. With tmux, your terminal sessions run inside a server-side process that persists independently of your SSH connection. You can detach from a session, disconnect, reconnect hours later from a […]
Netdata is a lightweight, real-time performance monitoring agent that provides per-second metrics with zero configuration for hundreds of applications and services out of the box. Unlike traditional monitoring solutions that poll at 15- or 60-second intervals, Netdata collects data every second and renders interactive charts in its built-in web dashboard instantly. It is designed to […]
