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Riemann – A network monitoring system

riemann.io

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#32

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 fil…

IME configs often end up being turing-complete; if so, better to have them in a real programming language where you at least have tools available to manage the complexity.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A full programming language is likely more effort to learn than a custom DSL. If you're in a position where you can reuse the full programming language then it's probably better, but if you're never going to use that programming language for anything other than this one product then the DSL is probably better.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#35
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clojure is a bigger language than small custom DSL.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#36
post #3

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

Functional means different things to different people. By all means learn Clojure, but also learn a functional language with a first-class type system (e.g. Haskell).

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You need a place with all that information anyway, otherwise how do you alert on something being missing?

If you can't easily do that with your existing infrastructure, you should fix that first. I've written about this at http://www.robustperception.io/you-look-good-have-you-lost-m...

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#38
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

The general advice is to run Prometheus behind the firewall, you want as few things between your monitoring and what you're monitoring as possible. This makes it more resilient.

Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system

#40

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 fil…

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

For stream processing engines, configuration will be code. Unfortunate, but unavoidable.

> Riemann is not a replacement for an alerting mechanism

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

Indeed it is not. It's misadvertised as a monitoring solution, while it's a stream processing engine.

What I think of it is that you're supposed build a monitoring system on top of stream processing engine. It's a pity Riemann doesn't allow to subscribe to its streams from the outside, so to add any message destination you need to update its config.

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