How does a system like this differ from say, the ElasticSearch+Logstash system?
Riemann – A network monitoring system
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#72Hm, why the name? I don't get it. Riemann wasn't knowing for being a good monitor or sentry.
Perhaps the idea is related to Riemann sums being an approximation of areas under curves where the curve is supposed to represent reality? Either that or that the Riemann hypothesis is an important problem that lots of people have tried to solve but have really failed.
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#73Monitoring request - dynamic configuration. Using Nagios requires configuration file changes and service reload Would prefer dynamic, on the fly configuration. Even better, configuration that can be adjusted externally, possibly from a web API endpoint. Better still, configuration that IS external, where the monitoring service queries an external service every X minutes to determine what to monitor. Performant - In t…
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Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#74Monitoring request - dynamic configuration. Using Nagios requires configuration file changes and service reload Would prefer dynamic, on the fly configuration. Even better, configuration that can be adjusted externally, possibly from a web API endpoint. Better still, configuration that IS external, where the monitoring service queries an external service every X minutes to determine what to monitor. Performant - In t…
I'm working on a startup that does exactly this. It's AWS only and in private beta right now: https://opsee.com/
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#75Reminder that the author of Reimann is available for consulting and is a scary-smart human being based around SF.
Specifically, it was written by Kyle Kingsbury aka aphyr of the Jepsen fame.
He consults on Riemann? I was under the impression he wanted nothing to do with helping people use it, and is just a general consultant. Like, he's not trying to support Riemann, he built it because he needed it. Maybe he's changed his mind?
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#76Evaluated it and a couple of others. Chose Bosun, never looked back, it's probably the only system with flexible and concise DSL for evaluating alerts (somewhat similar to R in spirit).
Riemann rocks, just not as monitoring system.
Bosun link: http://bosun.org/
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with configs (and this is with my operations hat on), is that they are rarely as well secured (or reviewed) as regular code, so code based configuration files pose a significant privilege escalation threat on production servers. With my programmer's hat on, they're also harder to populate programmatically, so I have a hard time justifying their use.
> The problem with configs (and this is with my operations hat on), is that they are rarely as well secured (or reviewed) as regular code, so code based configuration files pose a significant privilege escalation threat on production servers. Any complex config file runs that kind of risk though, whether it's in a well-known programming language or an ad-hoc DSL. My preferred approach is to include most of the config…
If it's code, the only way to evaluate it is to run it. That makes it very hard to reason about at scale. ("Which URLs go to load balancer x with SSL".) Not a great idea, in my opinion.
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#78Evaluated 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…
skyline is abandoned though lol
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#79Evaluated 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…
We use Riemann at Two Sigma to monitor/alert/heal our Mesos cluster [1], precisely because of above reasons to reject.
>- 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
This is actually great -- static files quickly become their own franken-languages, with code generating config files.
>- 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.
You probably don't want another alerting mechanism; you probably already have pagerduty or something else -- what you want is a rich way to create the alert.
Re: Riemann – A network monitoring system
#80Riemann is great. We use it at work. I like it so much that I did an experiment to implement it in C++ https://github.com/juruen/cavalieri My implementation sucks, but I had a lot of fun working on it and I got to learn how Riemann works better.
Good job on the README!
Went to check it out, expecting something funny.
Was surprised to see the most comprehensive and will written documentation I've ever seen on Github!