Thoughts on Working Remotely

September 24, 2015 Josh Reichardt 4 Comments

I’d like to share a few nuggets that I have learned so far in my experience working as a remote employee. I have been working from home for around a year and a half and have learned some lessons in my experience thus far. While I absolutely recommend trying the remote option if possible, there are a few things that are important to know.

Working remotely is definitely not for everybody. In order to be an effective remote employee you have to have a certain amount of discipline, internal drive and self motivation. Additionally, you need to be a good communicator (covered below). If you have trouble staying on task or finding things to do at work or even have issues working by yourself in an isolated environment, you will quickly discover that working remotely may be more stressful than working in an office where you get the daily interactions and guidance from others.

Benefits

That being said, I feel that in most cases, the positives outweigh the negatives. Below are a few of the biggest benefits that I have discovered.

There is little to no commute. Long commutes, especially in big cities create a certain amount of stress and strain that you simply don’t have to deal with when working from home. As a bonus you save some cash on gas and miles of wear and tear on your vehicle.
It is easier to avoid distractions. This of course depends on how you handle your work but if you are disciplined it becomes much easier to get work done with less distractions. At home, if you manage to separate home from work (more on that topic below) then you don’t need to worry about random people stopping over to your desk to shoot the shit or bother you. By avoiding simple distractions you can become much more productive in shorter periods of time.
No dress code. This is a surprisingly simple but powerful bonus to working from home. Having a criteria for dress code was actually stressful for me in previous jobs. I always disagreed with having a dress code and didn’t understand why I couldn’t wear a t-shirt and jeans to work. Now that I can wear whatever I want I feel more comfortable and more relaxed which leads to better productivity.
Schedule can be more flexible. I can pick my own hours for the most part. Obviously it is best to get in to a routine of working the same hours each day but if something comes up I can step out for a few hours and just make the hours up in the evening most in most cases and it won’t be a big deal to coworkers. This flexibility is a great perk to working remotely and it allows you much more time to yourself when needed because you aren’t restricted to a set schedule.

Achieving a Work/life balance

Maintaining a balance between life at home and life at work can get very blurry when working from home as a telecommuter. I would argue that finding a balance between personal life and work is the number one most important thing to work towards when making the transition from an on site employment because it directly leads to your happiness (or sorrow), which in turn influences all other aspects of your life, including activities and relationships outside of work.

It is super easy to get in to the habit of “always being around” and working extra and often time crazy hours when you are at home. One thing that has helped in my own experience to improve the work/life balance and alleviate this always working thing is by creating routines.

I try to start work and end work at the same time of the day each day during the week. Likewise, I make a point to take breaks throughout the day to break up the time. A few things I like to do are take a 30ish minute walk around the same time every day and I also have a coffee ritual in the morning that always precedes work time. These daily cues help me get in to the flow of the day and to get my day started the same way every day.

Another mechanism I have discovered to help cope with the work hours is to leave work at work. Find a way to create clear distinctions between home and work, either by creating an office at home where work stays or consider finding a coffee shop or co-working space. As a side note, I have found 2-3 days working at a coffee shop/co-working space to be the best middle ground for me, but everybody is different so if you are new to remote work you will need to experiment. That way you can have a place that represents what a workplace should be, and you when you leave that place, the work stays there. It is very important to separate home from work if you don’t have a clear distinction between the two.

Some folks mention that it can get lonely. I definitely agree with this sentiment. On the up side, working in this type of environment can sort of force you to find ways to interact with people. It can feel uncomfortable at first, but finding social activities will help alleviate the loneliness. Coffee shops and co-working spaces are a great place to start. I find that working in an environment with others helps mix things up and having the extra interaction really helps feeling like you are a part of a community. These environments are a great solution if you are introverted and have a hard time getting out and meeting people.

Regardless of what exactly you do, it is absolutely critical to get out of your house. This should be a no brainer but I can’t stress the importance enough. Even if you’re just taking walks or going to the store, you need to make sure that you find things to do to get out of the house. I have found some things that work but it is something again that you will need to experiment with.

If you are ambitious then I suggest getting involved in some other communities outside of work. Meeting new people (outside of a work environment) is a very powerful tool in managing your work/life balance. Obviously this advice works as well in more scenario’s than working remotely but I think it becomes much more important. If you want some ideas for ways to get out or communities to join, feel free to email or comment and I can let you know what has worked for me.

Communicate

Another important piece of the social aspect that I have discovered is that it is VERY important to have many open communication channels with coworkers. Google Hangouts, Slack, Screenhero, WebEx, Skype, email, IRC and any other collaboration tools you can find are super important for communicating with coworkers and for building relationships and culture in distributed work environments. In my experience, if you are working as part of a team and aren’t a great communicator, relationships with coworkers can quickly become strained.

Also, having regular meetings with key members of your team is important. A nice once a week check in with any managers is a good starting point. It helps you keep track of what you’re doing and it helps others on your team understand the type of work you’re doing so you’re not as isolated. Gaining the trust of your coworkers is always very important.

Conclusion

The most difficult balance to achieve when transitioning to a work from home opportunity for me, was maintaining a good work/life balance. You are 100% responsible for how you choose to spend your time so it becomes important to make the right decisions when it comes to how to prioritize.

For example, one thing I have struggled with is how to work the right amount of time. There was a stretch where I was working 12-14 days just because I kept finding more and more things to do. While that is good for your employer, it is not good for you or anyone around you. The work will always be there, so you have to find strategies to help you step away from work when you have put in enough hours for the day.

Everybody is different so if you are new to telecommuting/working remotely I encourage you to experiment with different techniques for managing your work/life balance. While I feel that working remotely is for the most part a bonus, it still has its own set of issues so please be careful and don’t work too much, and especially don’t expend extra energy or get too stressed out about things you can’t control.

Graphite threshold alerting with Sensu

September 8, 2015 Josh Reichardt 10 Comments

Instrumenting your code to report application level metrics is definitely one of the most powerful monitoring tasks you can accomplish. It is damn satisfying to get working the first time as well. Having the ability to look at your application and how it is performing at a granular level can help identify potential issues or bottlenecks but can also give you a greater understanding of how people are interacting with the application at a broad scale. Everybody loves having these types of metrics to talk about their apps and products so this style of monitoring is a great win for the whole team.

I don’t want to dive in to the specifics of WHAT you should monitor here, that will be unique to every environment. Instead of covering the what and how of instrumenting the code to report specific metrics, I will be running through an example of what the process might look like for instrumenting a check and alarm for monitoring and alerting purposes at an operations level. I am not a developer, so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what types of things are important to collect metrics on. Usually my job instead is to figure out how to monitor and alert effectively, based on the metrics that developers come up with.

Sensu has a great plugin to check Graphite thresholds in their plugin repo. If you haven’t looked already, take a minute to glance over the options a little bit and see how the plugin works. It is a pretty simple plugin but has been able to do everything I need it to.

One common monitoring task is to check how long requests are taking. So in this example, we are querying the Graphite server and reporting a critical status (status 1) if the request averages more than 7 seconds for a response time.

Here is the command you would run manually to check this threshold. Make sure to download the script if you haven’t already, you can just copy the code directly or clone the repo if you are doing this manually. If you are using Sensu you can use the sensu_plugin LWRP to grab the script (more on that below).

./check-data -s <servername:port> -t <graphite query> -c 7000 -u user -p password
./check-data -s graphite.example.com -t alias(stats.timer.server.response_time.mean, 'Mean') -c 7000 -u myuser -p awesomepassword

There are a few things to note. The -s flag specifies which graphite server or endpoint to hit, -t specifies the target or the graphite query to run the script against, the -c flag sets the threshold, -u and -p are used if your Graphite server uses authentication. If your Graphite instance is public it should probably use auth, otherwise if it is internal only, probably not as important. Obviously these are just dummy values, included to give you a better idea of what a real command should look like. Use your own values in their place.

The query we’re running is against a statsd metric that for mean response time for a request that gets recorded from the code (this is the developer instrumenting their code part I mentioned). This check is specific to my environment so you will need to modify any of your queries to make sure to alert on a useful metric and threshold in your own environment.

Here’s an example of what the graphite graph (rendered in Grafana) looks like.

Obviously this is just a sample but it should give you the general idea of what to look for.

If you examine the script, there are a few Ruby Gem requirements to get the script to run, which you will need to be installed if you haven’t already. They are sensu-plugin, json, json-uri and openssl. You don’t need the sensu-plugin if you are just running the check manually but you WILL need to have it installed on the Sensu client that will be running the scheduled check. That can be done manually or with the Sensu Chef recipe (specifically for turning on Sensu embedded ruby and ruby gems), which I recommend using anyway if you plan on doing any type of deployments at scale using Sensu.

Here is the Chef code looks like if you use Sensu to deploy this check automatically.

sensu_check "check_request_time" do 
  command "#{node['sensu']['plugindir']}/check-data.rb -s graphite.example.com -t \"alias(stats.timers.server.facedetection.response_time.mean, 'Mean')\" -c 7000 -a 360 -u myuser -p awesomepassword"
  handlers ["pagerduty", "slack"] 
  subscribers ["core"] 
  interval 60 
  standalone true 
  additional(:notification => "Request time above threshold", :occurrences => 5)
end

This should look familiar if you have any background using the Sensu Chef cookbook. Basically we are using the sensu_check LWRP to execute the script with the different parameters we want, using the pagerduty and slack handlers, which are just fancy ways to pipe out the results of the check. We are also saying we want to run this on a scheduled interval time of 60 seconds as a standalone check, which means it will be executed on the client node (not the Sensu server itself). Finally, we are saying that after 5 failed checks we want to append a message to the handler that says what exactly is going wrong.

You can stick this logic in an existing recipe or create a new one that handles your metrics threshold checks. I’m not sure what the best practice is for where to put the check but I have a recipe that runs standalone threshold checks that I stuck this logic in to and it seems to work. Once the logic has been added you should be able to run chef-client for the new check to get picked up.

Intro to Systemd

September 2, 2015 Josh Reichardt 2 Comments

I have a rocky relationship with Systemd. On the one hand I love how powerful and extensive it is. On the other hand, I hate how cumbersome and clunky it can sometimes feel. There are a TON of moving components and it is very confusing to use if you have no experience with it. The aim of this post is NOT to debate relative merits of Systemd but instead to take users through a few basic examples of how to accomplish tasks with Systemd and get familiar with how to manage systems with this framework.

My background is primarily with Debian/Ubuntu so moving over to this init system has been a learning curve. The problem I had when I first made the transition is that there aren’t a lot of great resources currently for making the change.

Most of my knowledge has been pieced together from various blog posts and sites, the best of which is over at the Arch wiki. As Systemd continues to mature it is becoming increasingly easier to find good guides and resources but the Arch wiki is still the defacto, go to place to find resources about how to use Systemd.

Another thing that has helped is forcing myself to use CoreOS, which, for better or worse has forced me to learn how to use Systemd. It seems that most modern Linux distro’s are moving towards Systemd, so it’s probably worth it to at least begin experimenting with it at this point. Ubuntu 15.04 as well as Debian 8 have both made the jump, along with other RedHat based distro’s, with more to follow.

While the learning curve can be a little steep to start with, you can learn about 80% of the things that Systemd can do with about 20% of the effort. Getting the basics down takes a little bit of effort but will more than be enough to manage a system. Before starting, as a disclaimer, I do not claim to be an expert but I have learned the hard way how things work and sometimes don’t work with Systemd.

Basics of Systemd

So now that we have a little bit of background stuff out of the way, we can look at some of the meat and potatoes of Systemd. The first thing to do is get an idea of what services are running on your system.

systemctl

This will give you a listing of everything running on your system. Usually there are a very large number of units listed. This isn’t really important but say for example, there is a failed unit. You can filter systemctl to only spit out failed units.

systemctl --failed

That’s pretty cool. If, for examle there is a failed unit file you can drill down in to that unit specifically.

systemctl status <unit>

This will give you process and service information for the unit file and the last 10 lines of logs for the unit as well, which can be really handy for troubleshooting.

One of the easier ways to work with unit files is to use the edit subcommand. This method removes much of the complexity of having to know exactly where all of the unit files live on the system.

systemctl edit --full <unit>

You can manage and interact with Systemd and the unit files in a straight forward way. We will examine a few examples.

systemctl start <unit> - start a stopped service
systemctl stop <unit> - stop a running service
systemctl restart <unit> - restart a service
systemctl disable <unit> - stop unit from loading on boot
systemctl enable <unit>  - load unit on boot

If you make a change to a service or unit file (we will go over this later) you need to reload the Systemd daemon for it to pick up the changes to the file.

sytemctl daemon-reload

This is super important (on CoreOS at least) when troubleshooting because if you don’t run the reload your process will not update and will not change its behavior.

There are many many more tips and tricks for working with systemctl but this should give users a basic grasp on interacting with components of the system. Again, for lots more details I advise that you check out the wiki.

Journalctl

If you are coming from older Debian/Ubuntu distros you will need to get familiar with using journalctl to view and manipulate your log files.

One of the first changes that people notice right away is that there aren’t any beloved log files /var/log in Systemd any more. Well, there are still logs, but it isn’t what most folks are used to.

The files haven’t gone away, they are simply disguised as a binary file and are accessible via journald. To check how much space your logs are taking up on disk you can use the following command.

journalctl --disk-usage

Journalctl is a powerful tool for doing just about everything you can think of with log files. Because journald writes logs as a binary file you need this tool to interact with them. That’s okay though because journalctl has pretty much all of the features needed to look through logs with its built in flags. For example, if you want to tail a log file, you can use the “-f” flag to follow “-u” to specify the systemd unit and the systemd unit name to follow it as illustrated below (this is a CoreOS system so your results may vary on a different OS).

journalctl -f -u motdgen

To follow all the entries that journalctl is picking up (pretty much just tailing all the logs as an equivalent) you can just use this.

journalctl -f

Sometimes you only want to view the last X number of entries in a log file. To look at older entries you can use the “-n” flag.

journalctl -n 100 -u motdgen

You can filter logs to only show messages since the last boot.

journalctl -b

There are many more options and the filtering capabilities of journalctl are very powerful. Additionally, journalctl offers JSON outputs, filtering by log priority, granular filtering by time with –unit and –since flags, filtering on different boots, and more.

I suggest exploring on your own a little bit to see how far the capabilities can go. Here is a link to all of the various flags that journalctl has as well as a good writeup to get a good idea of some of the more advanced capabilities of journalctl.

Drop-in Units

Writing unit files is somewhat of an art form. I feel that it can quickly become such a complicated topic that I won’t discuss it in full detail here.

By default, Systemd unit files are written to /usr/lib/systemd/system and custom defined unit files are written to /etc/systemd/system. Systemd looks at both locations for which files to load up. Because of this, you can extend base units that live in the /usr/lib path by augmenting them in /etc/systemd.

This has a few implications. First, it makes management of unit files a little bit easier to work with. It also makes extending units a little bit easier. You don’t need to worry about manipulting the system level units, you just add functionality on top of them in /etc/systemd.

Drop-in units are a handy feature if you need to extend a basic unit. To make the drop-in work, it must follow the format of /etc/systemd/system/unit.d/override.conf, where unit.d is the full name of the service that you are extending.

The following example extends the CoreOS baked in etcd2 service

/etc/systemd/system/etcd2.service.d/30-configuration.conf

[Service]
# General settings
Environment=ETCD_DEBUG=true

Replacing Cron

Well not exactly. Systemd doesn’t use cron jobs so if you want to get something to run on a schedule you will need to use a timer unit and associate a service with it.

[Unit]
Description=Log file cleaner (runs daily at midnight)

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily

Notice that there is a log-cleaner.timer as well as a log-cleaner.service (below). The easiest way I have found is to create a service/timer pair, which ensures that the timer runs the service based on its schedule.

[Unit]
Description=Log file cleaner

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash -c "truncate -s 1m /data/*.log"

The only thing that the service is doing is running a shell command which will get run based on the timer directive in the timer unit file.

The timer directive in the timer unit is pretty flexible. For example, you can tell the timer to run based on the calendar either by day, week or month or alternately you can have the unit run services based on the system time by seconds, minutes or hours.

One of the down sides of timers is that there is not an easy way to email results. With cron this is easily configurable. Likewise, timers don’t have a random delay to run jobs like cron has. So, timers are definitely no replacement for cron but have a lot of usable functionality, it is just confusing to learn at first, especially if you are used to cron.

Here is more involved tutorial for working with timers. Also, the Arch wiki once again is great and has a dedicated section for timers.

Conclusion

This introduction is really just the beginning. There are so many more pieces to the Systemd puzzle, I have just covered the basics, in fact I have deliberately chosen not to cover many of the topics and concepts because they can convolute the learning process and slow down the knowledge. I chose to focus instead on the most basic ideas that are used most frequently in day to day administration. Feel free to go do your own research and play around with the more advanced topics.

Systemd aims to solve a lot of problems but brings about a lot of complexity as well to accomplish this task. In my opinion it is definitely worth investing the time and energy to learn this system and service manager though, pretty much all the Linux distro’s are moving towards it in the future and you would be doing yourself a disservice by not learning it.

Other areas of Systemd that aren’t covered in this post but are worth researching and playing with are:

Targets (analogous to runlevels)
Managing NTP with timedateclt
Network management with networkd
Hostname management with hostnamectl
Username management with loginctl

One of the easiest ways to get started with systemd is by grabbing a Vagrant box that leverages Systemd. I like the CoreOS Vagrant box but there are many other options for getting started. One of the best tools for learning is by doing, so take some of these commands and resources and go start playing around with Systemd. Feel free if you have any extra additions or need help getting started with Systemd.