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Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

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Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#111

Post by _jal »

geofft wrote: post #96
_jal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both right. Instrumentation and alerts are vital - they leverage inhuman persistence, patience and low cost. But alerts do not substitute for a deep understanding of how your systems work. A number of the more useful "pre-crime" alerts we have derived from that - if I hadn't been elbow-deep in our systems long enough to notice certain behaviors have non-obvious second- and third-order effects downstream, we wo…

So, I'm making a bit of a subtle claim - you should absolutely be elbow-deep in your systems, and you should be understanding things well enough to build these sorts of proactive alerts, but you shouldn't rely on people being elbow-deep for noticing problems in real time. If you're ever at the point where you catch a problem and automated monitoring didn't, that's a bug in automated monitoring. If you are really good…

> but you shouldn't rely on people being elbow-deep for noticing problems in real time.

I completely and unreservedly agree.

> that's a bug in automated monitoring

As part of incident review, we explicitly added a "review monitor performance" step. My favorite part is that the number of times monitors are created, adjusted or complained about post-incident is in itself a highly useful datapoint.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#112

Post by woutr_be »

sub7 wrote: post #103

Problem with this is that any half competent team can put something like this up in an hour or so. Wallboards are for high level stats - like 1 or 2 numbers the team should focus on. Maybe the tiles are super smart and can do uptime testing, log monitoring etc in which case this should be positioned as an uptime tester/log monitor etc

Speaking from personal experience, our team originally made our own wallboard, and it was put on a big monitor in our space. Originally all was fine, the board would stop updating numbers once in a while, but nobody really cared. Just ssh into our raspberry pi, and restart the services.

Turns out that our scrum masters and product owners looked at this board when they walked by, now they wanted to see other things as well. So they started allocating developer time to build these statistics, obviously a job nobody wanted to do. So we bought an existing solution that had all the data sources we needed, and let the business manager their stats.

So yeah, I agree anyone could build it themselves, but it rarely sticks to those 1 or 2 numbers, in which case, it's cheaper to spend a couple of bucks, than have developers continue to support it.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#113

Post by sneak »

stiray wrote: post #80
SergeAx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you need an app where webpage is more than enough?

One more thing, if I want a webpage, I will just write plugin for this: https://github.com/netdata/netdata It is meant as system monitor but it can chew up preatty much anything. And it is fast and lean. Really fast.

Note well that it will silently send lots of information about your machine and browsing/usage to Google:

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366

They added a tiny mention in the installer when I complained, but they still don’t mention how to opt out. The opt out doesn’t disable the spyware in the webpage, either.

I have a patched version (sneak/netdata) on dockerhub, if you like. The issue is that it’s just not that great of a system monitor. Looking at, say, a “last 24h” chart is difficult. It’s a good and pretty replacement for top/htop/iptraf/iotop, but that’s pretty much it. You still need a graphite or prometheus or mrtg/rrdtool ultimately for serious understanding beyond “what happened in the last few minutes”.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#114

Post by 314 »

sneak wrote: post #113
stiray wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more thing, if I want a webpage, I will just write plugin for this: https://github.com/netdata/netdata It is meant as system monitor but it can chew up preatty much anything. And it is fast and lean. Really fast.

Note well that it will silently send lots of information about your machine and browsing/usage to Google: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366 They added a tiny mention in the installer when I complained, but they still don’t mention how to opt out. The opt out doesn’t disable the spyware in the webpage, either. I have a patched version (sneak/netdata) on dockerhub, if you like. The issue is that it’s just…

There are 17 lines of text output to verify the installation choices, of them 5 are devoted to opting out of the anonymous telemetry. The wording seems clear.

  NOTE:
  Anonymous usage stats will be collected and sent to Google Analytics.
  To opt-out, pass --disable-telemetry option to the installer or export
  the enviornment variable DO_NOT_TRACK to a non-zero or non-empty value
  (e.g: export DO_NOT_TRACK=1).

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#115

Post by sneak »

314 wrote: post #114
sneak wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note well that it will silently send lots of information about your machine and browsing/usage to Google: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366 They added a tiny mention in the installer when I complained, but they still don’t mention how to opt out. The opt out doesn’t disable the spyware in the webpage, either. I have a patched version (sneak/netdata) on dockerhub, if you like. The issue is that it’s just…

There are 17 lines of text output to verify the installation choices, of them 5 are devoted to opting out of the anonymous telemetry. The wording seems clear. NOTE: Anonymous usage stats will be collected and sent to Google Analytics. To opt-out, pass --disable-telemetry option to the installer or export the enviornment variable DO_NOT_TRACK to a non-zero or non-empty value (e.g: export DO_NOT_TRACK=1).

Ahh, nice to see they updated it. Too bad they're still not actually getting consent.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#116

Post by 314 »

sneak wrote: post #115
314 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 17 lines of text output to verify the installation choices, of them 5 are devoted to opting out of the anonymous telemetry. The wording seems clear. NOTE: Anonymous usage stats will be collected and sent to Google Analytics. To opt-out, pass --disable-telemetry option to the installer or export the enviornment variable DO_NOT_TRACK to a non-zero or non-empty value (e.g: export DO_NOT_TRACK=1).

Ahh, nice to see they updated it. Too bad they're still not actually getting consent.

This message appears before a y/n confirmation prompt - i.e. explicit user consent.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#117

Post by sneak »

314 wrote: post #116
sneak wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, nice to see they updated it. Too bad they're still not actually getting consent.

This message appears before a y/n confirmation prompt - i.e. explicit user consent.

The y/n is for install. It’s saying “do you want to install with telemetry, xor not install at all.”

That’s like those EULAs on websites that say “by continuing to use our site, you agree never to sue us, to surrender your first born to us, and to never speak ill of us for any reason, et c.”

That’s simply not affirmative consent. Imagine if you tried that in life! “Anyone who stays in this room after 5pm is consenting to be groped! Proceed at your own risk.”

That’s not how any of this works. Stating your intentions to assume and potentially violate consent is not obtaining consent.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#118

Post by gtyras2mrs »

scoutt wrote: post #74
tilolebo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clocks are an anti pattern... Why would you want to have the time displayed permanently? It's such a distraction for developers. Just set automated alerts for lunch and end of day and that's it.

Well, I have a clock in the wall in front of me that permanently displays the time. I check the time several times a day, for example to check how much time left I have to do something before lunch or going home, or a having a meeting. I don't know why are we discussing the practical uses of a clock. I can't imagine a life where one is allowed to look at a clock only when an alarm or alert is triggered.

Sounds like sarcasm to me. (Since folks somewhere above say that monitoring dashboards are an anti pattern and what you need is alerts)

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#119

Post by 314 »

sneak wrote: post #117
314 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This message appears before a y/n confirmation prompt - i.e. explicit user consent.

The y/n is for install. It’s saying “do you want to install with telemetry, xor not install at all.” That’s like those EULAs on websites that say “by continuing to use our site, you agree never to sue us, to surrender your first born to us, and to never speak ill of us for any reason, et c.” That’s simply not affirmative consent. Imagine if you tried that in life! “Anyone who stays in this room after 5pm is consentin…

I took another look, it's not a y/n prompt as I wrote before. It lists all the settings and asks for confirmation. Each of the other settings requires a trip to the docs to find out how to change before re-running. The telemetry is given special prominence with instructions about how to change before the prompt.

Re: Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard

#120

Post by tyrust »

reaperducer wrote: post #78
tyrust wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's not a problem with dashboards. That's a problem with training and staffing people. Training and staffing people to look at dashboards? I've never heard of this and it sounds awful.

"Hey, Mike. On your way to the Keurig, remember to glance at the status panel on the wall and let us know if something doesn't look right, OK?" Brutal.

I read your comment as sincerely saying that such an arrangement would be "brutal". Looking at your downvotes maybe people think you were being sarcastic?
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