Ask HN: Best monitoring system? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#31

Post by eeZah7Ux » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #21

It depends on your architecture and scale. There is no "best", just "best we've found for this" and "best given other constraints". This is yet another point where DevOps is not "devs doing ops" but "operations building and deploying with all the tools of modern software development". You need a subject matter expert. What are you monitoring? Do you care about availability or performance or both? Scale? Do you have s…

> You need a subject matter expert

Spot on. Too many people think that monitoring is about slapping a piece of code on some hosts. Monitoring is data science.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#32

Post by arjan_sch » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

AppSignal is also a cool product, although mostly focused on Rails applications. And, a big plus, they are working on an Elixir integration :-) https://appsignal.com/elixir

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#33

Post by rmykhajliw » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

Why not to start with AWS Cloud Watch: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/details/ - simple, scalable, but of the box solution. It's much simpler than build similar functionality yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#34

Post by tokenizerrr » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

jc4p wrote: post #24

At Stack Overflow we use a homebuilt Go solution called bosun: http://bosun.org/ -- it runs on pretty much anything and lets us incorporate data from windows machines / linux machines in one place.

I recently tried out Bosun and liked it a lot. The documentation is a little light, and the dependency on hbase and hadoop (since opentsdb uses that) is a bit of a pain. Maintaining those isn't particularly straight forward or fun.

I'm also interested in prometheus but haven't gotten to try it out yet. Anyone reading this have experience with both? How do they compare?

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#35

Post by sickeythecat » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

Plenty of folks building large scale custom monitoring solutions with InfluxDB (plus Grafana, Collectd, Telegraf etc) - https://influxdata.com/testimonials/

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#36

Post by falcolas » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #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.

There's always a server. Regardless of how far away you've abstracted it away, there's always a server which should probably be monitored (even if to know when it's about to fail and should have work shunted off it prior to its failure). Icinga and others make it easy to programmatically add and remove servers as they enter and leave your environment.

Even if you don't have access to the server so you can monitor it, you can use the "host" concept as containers for your services: "api.mycorp.com", "tasks.mycorp.com", "backups.mycorp.com" are great starting points.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#37

Post by acd » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

Prometheus.io which is a modern fresh monitoring system that I would checkout if replacing a legacy system.

Also take a look at Riemann which is system monitoring written in Clojure. Riemann should be good for monitoring latency of the system.

If it helps here is Slidedeck from Spotify how they do their monitoring https://www.netways.de/fileadmin/images/Events_Trainings/Eve...

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#38

Post by mspaulding06 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #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.

Yeah, containerization is a good point. We've been starting to deploy apps on Docker within the last 6 months. What does Prometheus offer that makes it better for containerization?

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#39

Post by thdn » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

grafana ??

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#40

Post by tayo42 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

Zenfinch wrote: post #10

If you can have a monitoring system in the cloud Datadog is a great choice. Good documentation, UI, many, many plugins and fair pricing (IMO). https://www.datadoghq.com/ (Im not affiliated with in any way other than using their product on a pet project with many moving parts).

Datadog was down so often when I had to use it. It felt so unreliable. We used to monitor hosts and it got to the point where checking if datadog was down was part of troubleshooting..