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Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

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Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#111

Post by de107549 »

bbrazil wrote: post #110
de107549 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's first say that I am the co-founder an CEO of Instana, but I am trying to give a generic answer so that I don't "attack" competitors. Most of the mentioned tools in this thread, including Datadog, SignalFX etc are using a simple agent to collect data - see Datadog agent on GitHub: https://github.com/DataDog/dd-agent or statsD ( https://github.com/etsy/statsd ) that is mostly recommended by SignalFX who have no o…

> stream are the superior approach in my point of view as they allow for realtime approaches and stream (window based) analytics. I'd see them as slightly different approaches to providing fundamentally the same solution. One builds up time series and then operates on them, the other operates on the time series as they come in. Taking Prometheus as an example we're a time series database, and you can do both realtime…

I agree that streaming and timeseries queries/scans are two different approaches which can solve the problem in the same way. With instant vectors of Prometheus queries you can operate very similar to windows and if you do the right queries and take care that it works in-memory you also should get similar performance and throughput.

My point was more about the framework you get and how easy it is to apply analytics to streams/queries. SignalFx seems to have a nice workbench for this with direct visual feedback in the UI, so that you can work on existing data to get the right result.

As said we at Instana think that most people will not be able to build a sophisticated monitoring solution with these types of frameworks as they don't have the time to do it and maybe even not the analytical domain knowledge. You can see that SignalFx is adding specific knowledge for some technologies. I give you two simple examples to show that it is not easy:

- How would you predict if a file system is running out of disk space?

- How would you predict if you should add a node to a Cassandra cluster because it is running out of capacity (and it can take some serious time to add a node, so you should know in advance)?

Already the disk space problem is hard to solve - linear regression and basic algorithms will not work.

Now think of hundreds (or thousands) of services running on a dynamic container platform and new services released on a daily or even minute basis - with lots of different technologies involved...

No question that you can build a good monitoring solution with Prometheus, SignalFX, DataDog etc - but it will take a serious amount of time, consulting and dev teams involved adding the right instrumentation, metrics etc. And you need a lot of analytical knowledge. I can even imagine that there are situation were tools like Prometheus are a better choice - especially if you have a very strict set of technologies and communication framework and really good people to do a very specific set of "rules" for this environment.

We've added a domain model to our product (all the mentioned product have a generic metric model, but no semantics that describe servers, containers, processes, services and their communication which is the domain of system and application monitoring): Our Dynamic Graph.

And yes, we are using something very similar to Zipkin to get the dependencies between services. Here a are two blog entries describing the approach:

- About distributed tracing: https://www.instana.com/blog/evolution-tracing-application-p...

- How we safely instrument code: https://www.instana.com/blog/how-instana-safely-instruments-...

Mirko

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#112

Post by hithereok »

monitorman wrote: post #85
otterley wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We throw hundreds of thousands of metrics at Datadog per minute from thousands of hosts; it hasn't broken a sweat yet. Are you affiliated with Wavefront?

I'm a happy customer of Wavefront. I completely believe that Datadog can handle hundreds of thousands per minute -- especially if most of them are pre-canned, non-custom metrics grabbed by their agent. Hundreds of thousands of metrics/minute is a few thousand a second only. Wavefront does millions of custom metrics per second, which can be sent with different dimensions and tags. That's much harder.

You misspelled marketingman.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#113

Post by click170 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #17
click170 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - accidental down vote while trying to upvote on mobile.

There's now an 'undown' link you can click to undo accidental downs.

I don't see an 'undown' link anywhere, even when clicking on the timestamp of the comment I replied to. shrugs #PoorUI

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#114

Post by pcvarmint »

Cray Advance Cluster Engine EMS ( http://www.cray.com/products/computing/cs-series?tab=cs_seri... ). Formerly Appro Cluster Engine.

Complete control and monitoring of cluster with either a CLI or GUI. Scalable monitoring with negligible impact on running workloads, including global synchronization of metric collection times, to minimize jitter. Ganglia front-end, but without the overhead of gmond/gmetric running on nodes. Validated as scaling well on a 8,000 node cluster.

Full disclosure: I designed and implemented the monitoring system.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#115

Post by otterley »

de107549 wrote: post #111
bbrazil wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stream are the superior approach in my point of view as they allow for realtime approaches and stream (window based) analytics. I'd see them as slightly different approaches to providing fundamentally the same solution. One builds up time series and then operates on them, the other operates on the time series as they come in. Taking Prometheus as an example we're a time series database, and you can do both realtime…

I agree that streaming and timeseries queries/scans are two different approaches which can solve the problem in the same way. With instant vectors of Prometheus queries you can operate very similar to windows and if you do the right queries and take care that it works in-memory you also should get similar performance and throughput. My point was more about the framework you get and how easy it is to apply analytics t…

> SignalFx seems to have a nice workbench for this with direct visual feedback in the UI, so that you can work on existing data to get the right result.

Wavefront does as well; I'd recommend you compare it for competitive analysis.

So would you say your product is in direct competition with these offerings, or do you see it more as a complement to them?

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#116

Post by user5994461 »

disclaimer: I evaluated most of these tools and wrote a blog post here. https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/monitoring-in-the...

It's a bit old and i'll update it later, but here is the short resume with all the latest tool:

### Free (as in open-source) shitty options: icinga, nagios, riemann

They suck so much they're not even worthy of having their names written.

###

The other open-source option is prometheus.

I didn't try it personally but I've have candidates interviewing at my company who talked at length about their experience on it and they were satisfied.

I red the whole documentation and it's better than the old shitty tools but it's still not great. Be aware that it has many limitations by design, they skipped all the hard stuff (single node only, no HA, pull-mode only for metrics).

----

The new SaaS tools (ordered by maturity), all 10-20$ per host, they're mostly copy-cat:

Datadog, BMC truesigh pulse (Boundary), signalfx, wavefront, server density.

Datadog is the best option. It's older (about 5 years) and more mature. It has the most features and integrations. It's really the next generation of monitoring.

BMC truesight pulse is the historic competitor. It was a startup called "Boundary" that was bought by BMC, and BMC rebranded the product. That's about the same thing. Not sure what the acquisition may or may not have changed.

SignalFX is a direct copy-cat of datadog (and BMC). But it came later so it's lacking in features and integrations.

Wavefront is an even later copy-cat of datadog and signalfx. Except it has no public price nor public trial. You have to contact them and go through sales for anything. (Honestly: just ignore wavefront. There are 3 directs competitors who are better and more accessible).

ServerDensity: Don't bother trying. The website is buggy, it fails to load pages very often. The product is not even finished and lack 80% of the competitor features. The company will probably die soon. (sorry for their employees who are commenting here and reading that :\ )

[Google] StackDriver: It was another company that was acquired by Google 2 years ago. Currently, it's dead and it's being integrated to Google offerings. That might be great when it comes back (probably this year, there seem to be some closed beta given by Google at the moment).

### Current status-quo:

Datadog beats everything by a long margin. More mature, more features, more integrations. It's has the advantage and it's evolving faster. That's the horse you have to put your money on (I did).

You can try the competitors (either BMC or signalfx) if you wanna play around or just tickle datadog sales team to get a better price (I did) :D

### Far future:

There might be a market rupture within 1-2 years when google finally release StackDriver. It had some quite advanced stuff and great review when it was acquired. It's the only one that might be able to catch up with datadog and provide the very advanced stuff that doesn't currently exist (e.g. outlier detection done right).

If and When Google finally offers GCE (cheaper & faster than AWS) + kubernetes (docker and infrastructure on steroid) + StackDriver (complete monitoring AND logging solutions), they will be the best IaaS provider on the planet by a wide margin. The evolutions brought by these tools will allow me to do the work of 3 infra/sre guy all by myself.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#117

Post by user5994461 »

williamstein wrote: post #42
Zenfinch wrote: post #10

If you can have a monitoring system in the cloud Datadog is a great choice. Good documentation, UI, many, many plugins and fair pricing (IMO). https://www.datadoghq.com/ (Im not affiliated with in any way other than using their product on a pet project with many moving parts).

Just make sure you understand their pricing (I didn't): http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/07/datadogs-pricing-dont-m...

No offense there but it's very clear that the pricing is per host per month and it's a common practice in the industry.

Thinking you could get away with your current setup for $15 is very naive of you. It looks like you red it well but your refused to acknowledge it?

FYI prices for some popular services:

- BMC (direct competitor to datadog) is $12 per host per month

- SignalFx (other competitor) is using a $ price per metric stream per month (this one is tricky but they suggest to plan for $12 per host per month)

- NewRelic is $75 per host per month

- Dynatrace/Appdynamics are about $1000 per host per month

- AWS/GCE have pricing per hour (which is annoying to convert per month)

I agree on one thing though (and I did tell that to datadog guys directly). The price displayed in big should be $18 per month per host and not $15. The cheaper one if for an annual subscription which is not the most common case.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#118

Post by de107549 »

otterley wrote: post #115
de107549 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that streaming and timeseries queries/scans are two different approaches which can solve the problem in the same way. With instant vectors of Prometheus queries you can operate very similar to windows and if you do the right queries and take care that it works in-memory you also should get similar performance and throughput. My point was more about the framework you get and how easy it is to apply analytics t…

> SignalFx seems to have a nice workbench for this with direct visual feedback in the UI, so that you can work on existing data to get the right result. Wavefront does as well; I'd recommend you compare it for competitive analysis. So would you say your product is in direct competition with these offerings, or do you see it more as a complement to them?

Yes, I didn't compare to Wavefront as I have only basic insights and therefore cannot make a valid statement.

Competition depends on the uses case - if you are using a tool like SignalXF for custom metric analytics, then we are no competition as our focus is monitoring of applications and its underlying infrastructure.

We are an Application Performance Management (APM) solution and therefore compete more with tools like New Relic oder AppDynamics. Theses tools are sadly only used for troubleshooting in 90% of the cases and not for management or monitoring. They also do not work in highly dynamic and scaled environments as there "model" is too static. (which they try to fix with their analytics offerings)

This is what we want to change and were we add the whole stack to the game to analyze all the dependencies and help finding root causes quickly and monitor and predict the KPIs of your applications, services, clusters and components.

We integrate with solutions like SignalFX if needed but I have really good experience to do "dashboarding" with more business related tools like Tableau or QlikView - this also offers application owners an easier way to aggregate the monitoring data and metrics on a higher (business) level, where tools like Instana offer the instrumentation data as an input.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#119

Post by calvinx408 »

I used to use nagios and migrated to sensu for system checks. I was using graphite/seyren for time series and alerting, but doing a YoY or week over week was very slow especially if it's a lot of metrics. You should look at http://wavefront.com

You can do some nice math functions for your alerts.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#120

Post by calvinx408 »

I used to use nagios and migrated to sensu for system checks. I was using graphite/seyren for time series and alerting, but doing a YoY or week over week was very slow especially if it's a lot of metrics. You should look at http://wavefront.com

You can do some nice math functions for your alerts.

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