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Riemann – A network monitoring system

riemann.io

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#21
post #8

"Network monitoring system" makes me think of routers, switches, Mbps / Gbps, etc. This seems more like a "server monitoring system."

Nope as well. It's more a stream processing engine. Icinga/Nagios or Zabbix are (inflexible) specializations of such engine.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#22
post #20

Note that this isn't a better nagios... It's more like Apache Storm. Think of it as grep on steroid. I've heard of several thousand events per seconds on a single server. The other advantage is that it uses a well known programing language rather than a DSL.

It's actually a disadvantage, since it's Clojure, and Riemann requires that its operator actually knows Clojure (knowledge of dozen languages, even when some of them are functional, is not enough).

Is requiring someone to learn a programming language worse than requiring someone to learn a custom DSL? Seems a strange assertion.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#23
post #15

I'm very happy to see riemann featured here. I've been using it in production since early 2012 and contributed to it (intensively, at one point) as well. It's been a breeze, rather worry free and its very good collectd support has enabled us to cover very interesting use cases at Exoscale.

I'm just getting started with riemann and I'm also learning clojure at the same time. How did you get buy in from your company to use riemann

I co-founded it :-)

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#25
post #3

Clojure. I think I should stop thinking and really learn that language now. It seems very tempting as a first functional language.

I would look at is as ok language for lightweight scripting of Java, but some areas like how bad the tracebacks are or how well many of the clojure-specific libraries are fleshed out (or quality of docs), leaves me with major concerns about the language.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#26
post #5

Anyone use http://prometheus.io/ ? wdyt

I don't like it since the master basically does a curl on each server to get the info, so it doesn't work behind a firewall without tons of issues

That's the reason I haven't bothered with Prometheus - pull systems make no sense to me since you have to configure a single place with perfect* knowledge of your system rather than just pushing local knowledge to a collector.

(Ok, you do need some knowledge at the parent if you want to raise alerts but you'd need that anyway.)

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#28
post #5

Anyone use http://prometheus.io/ ? wdyt

I don't like it since the master basically does a curl on each server to get the info, so it doesn't work behind a firewall without tons of issues

That's what the Prometheus push gateway is for. While prom itself is poll-based, you can extract data from servers behind a firewall by pushing metrics from an agent into the gateway. No crazy issues.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#29
We've been using Riemann since 2013 and love it!

If you're coming from Nagios (or not), and you'd like something that will schedule Nagios event scripts (and others) and send them to Riemann, I have been using this in production since mid-2013: https://github.com/bmhatfield/riemann-sumd

It allows you to tap into the huge ecosystem that is Nagios monitors, without requiring any other Nagios component at all. It just translates the output into a Riemann event.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#30
Evaluated it, and ultimately rejected it for a couple of reasons:

- You must pick up Clojure to understand and configure Riemann (we're not a Clojure shop, so this is a non-trivial requirement)

- Config file isn't a config file, it's an executed bit of Clojure code

- Riemann is not a replacement for an alerting mechanism, it's another signal for alerting mechanisms (though since it's Clojure and the configuration file is a Clojure script, you can absolutely hack it into becoming an alerting system)

- Riemann is not a replacement for a trend graphing mechanism.

- There are other solutions which can be piped together to get the 80% of the functionality we wanted from Riemann (Graphite + Skyline) in much less invested time

Skyline link: https://github.com/etsy/skyline

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