When developing Solr plugins for the open source community (or your in-house Solr team) you’re faced with testing the plugin’s compatiblity against a range of Solr versions. The Solr Test Framework provides a great tool set for writing JUnit and integration tests against a single Solr version. In this post I’ll guide you through adding Integration Tests to a Solr plugin project. We want to ensure the plugin’s functionality through a configurable range of Solr versions. I will add links to working examples in the Querqy Query Parser as I recently added those kind of tests there.

In e-commerce, response time is king. Regarding onsite search engines, response time tends to increase linearly with the number of products sold in an online shop. In a recent project, we enhanced a Solr search engine to overcome this barrier. We used the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter for progress validation (and regression detection).

One of the annoying things to deal with when it comes to Terraform infrastructure is Terraform state drift, which describes the mismatch between the configured Terraform resources and the infrastructure reality.

When spinning up compute instances in the cloud, a proper and fully automated configuration management is a key success factor. I usually use Ansible for the job as it’s open source and widely adopted. But when it comes to highly volatile cloud infrastructure with instances spinning up and terminating on demand, configuration management systems utilizing a control master (like Ansible, Puppet or SaltStack) can be cumbersome.

Logstash comes pre-packaged with a geoip filter plugin and a Maxmind Geolite2 database. But when running Logstash in a container environment, updating the bundled database can be a hazzle. If you need geoip lookups in other systems, a rest service is the perfect fit to deliver consistent geoip data.

Logstashs regular expression engine Grok is the swiss army knife when it comes to mine gold in your logfiles. Besides pure log enrichment, metric gathering of log data is a common requirement. Unfortunately Logstash is lacking a native solution to export custom metrics to Prometheus. In this post, I’ll walk you through a solution utilizing the graphite-exporter as an adapter.