Latest AppScope Updates: version 0.7 adds ability to attach to a running process, TLS support, and Alpine Linux support

The AppScope team has been hard at work since our release of the project and we’re thrilled to announce the latest update – AppScope 0.7. This release brings a host of fixes and improvements, but I wanted to highlight three key new features: attaching to running processes, TLS support, and Alpine Linux as an available operating system.

Scope a Running Process

First, I’m most excited about the ability to connect AppScope to a running process. If you wanted to run AppScope on an application previously, you’d have to start the application with AppScope enabled, like:

scope run nginx

While this works to introspect a new process, you typically want to troubleshoot a problematic process without restarting it. Restarting it may clear whatever’s causing the error in the first place. Now with scope attach, you can connect to an existing process id and start collecting events and metrics:

sudo scope attach [your nginx PID]

You’ll note that I added sudo in front of the attach command. You need to be root to connect to a running process. Like scope run, attach works with any Linux binary.

Note: If you’re using our containerized AppScope demo to experiment, you may need to start your container with the following options:

docker run ---privileged -it cribl/scope-demo bash

Support for TLS in AppScope 0.7

The second key feature in AppScope 0.7 is the ability to use TLS to securely send data to destinations, like LogStream or LogStream Cloud. Previously, AppScope only supported sending data over raw TCP sockets. As the world moves to SaaS-based offerings, TLS is a requirement. TLS is configured using environment variables or the configuration file.

Adding TLS means we had to drop support for CentOS 6 because TLS support requires glibc 2.7 or newer.

Alpine Linux Support

Lastly, the 0.7.0 release adds support for Alpine Linux. Because of Alpine’s use of the compact musl libc library, it required some special handling for AppScope. We got some requests for Alpine and we’re happy to offer it in this release.

Just One More Thing on AppScope 0.7

The rest of the fixes and improvements in this release can be found in the changelog. This release continues to make AppScope the easiest way to get data into LogStream Cloud and, from there, into any SaaS-based log analytics or metrics store you’re using today. If you’d like to learn more about AppScope or have questions, drop into our community. We’re over 2,100 people now and growing every day.

Photo by Mael BALLAND on Unsplash