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Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

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Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#11
I've used Nagios and Icinga2, and I've become a huge proponent of check_mk. The documentation isn't great, but the product rocks: with very little time, you can start monitoring a slew of services (disk, hardware, logs, ntp) with almost no tweaking required. You can easily create custom checks, but you also have all the Nagios plug-ins it's compatible with. No daemon listens on the hosts being monitored. You get graphing for free (no setup time) for almost all your checks.

It uses Nagios under the hood, it's basically an automation system that generates those Nagios systems. The GUI is amazing, because it uses a plug-in so you don't have to edit files on disk to group your hosts or tweak the alerts. Those configs are snapshotted automatically at every change, and you can replicate that configuration automatically to remote servers. Download it from the upstream site instead of relying on distro package repositories.

Caveat, the documentation sucks, the GUI can be nonintuitive and it's hard to Google problems. It takes time to fully tune. Out of the box you'll probably still be impressed though.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#15

It depends on your needs and budget. Can you afford time but not money? Try Sensu or Nagios. Do you have money and not time? Try datadog. Like someone else mentioned here, if you're looking to alert off of logs from ELK, try Elastalert.

Agree with this.

If you have money and no time: DataDog

If you don't mind putting in a little time: Sensu

Sensu is straightforward to deploy if you use Chef/Ansible/Puppet. It also supports running Nagios plugins which is pretty useful.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#18
Best at what? What is driving you to want to switch?

I like Icinga a lot. I won't bother reviewing it; is is very well known. Professionally, my last two gigs have used Zabbix.

Zabbix, architecturally, is a nightmare. Uses an RDBMS for storing time-series data, so it wastes a ton of space on historic data while managing to be far slower than it needs to be when querying larger ranges. Uses an agent. Has a proxy-agent that, while handy, encourages all sorts of sketchy, error-prone monitoring topologies. With 3.0, the UI has crawled out of the awful range, and is now merely annoying. Takes the all-singing, all-dancing monolithic approach for the main app, including features for drawing maps on big-screens.

For all that, it works well. Give it the hardware it wants, be sane in setting it up[1], ignore the goofy features (maps, inventory, screens - I guess someone must of requested those), and it is very solid and very powerful.

[1] The template system, pseudo-language for triggers, naming convention for variables and method of creating custom monitors take some getting used to. Expect to take the time to actually read the docs, and most likely to throw out your templates the first time you model your systems.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#19
Prometheus is absolutely the way you should be going. All of the other systems I'm seeing mentioned here — Nagios, Icinga, check_mk, Zabbix, Sensu — are host-centric and are very awkward when you try to bend them to fit modern (containerized, etc.) workloads.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#20
post #6

What do you have to monitor? For network hardware you can use Observium (or the fork LibreNMS). It's simple and work fine.

Kentik (www.kentik.com) is a great choice for monitoring network traffic details. Terabit-scale aggregates down to individual conversations. (Disclaimer: I work at Kentik)
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