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Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

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Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#81

Post by otterley »

pwelch wrote: post #15
atom_enger wrote: post #8

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.

Datadog does WAY more than Sensu does. Sensu doesn't handle metrics with more than 1 dimension, which should be a standard feature of any modern metrics platform.

I also disagree that setting up Sensu takes a "little" time. What is a "little" to an inexperienced Sensu administrator? A day? A week? Several weeks? Quantifying it would be valuable to the reader.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#82

Post by otterley »

enricobruschini wrote: post #79

Hi all, I'm surely biased as I work at Instana ( https://www.instana.com ), but here's my opinion about monitoring. Applications are dramatically and rapidly changing, with continuous delivery, microservice approach, containers and orchestration tools, things are all over and you might have a component spun up and down within few minutes. Humans cannot keep up with data and it doesn't make any sense to stare at a big…

Can you compare Instana to Datadog, SignalFX and Wavefront?

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#83

Post by otterley »

monitorman wrote: post #71
caw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago was that? We just switched in January and it's been pretty reliable. As far as Datadog goes, it's the most team friendly dashboard system we've used. We had a specialty monitoring system for one application stack previously, and no one made custom dashboards there or even just looked at the data. Now we've got custom dashboards out the nose and we're gradually consolidating to a "best of" dashboard for e…

Datadog may be okay if you're doing really simple stuff and not sending much data. Once you get to scale, you will need a system like Wavefront. Wavefront can take millions of data points per second, query on them super fast, and they don't go down. Every other monitoring system downsamples, or throws away your data after a certain amount of time.

We throw hundreds of thousands of metrics at Datadog per minute from thousands of hosts; it hasn't broken a sweat yet.

Are you affiliated with Wavefront?

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#84

Post by jmbwell »

Monit is lightweight, easy to configure, capable of monitoring and restarting pretty much anything, and free. It works standalone, or with the paid M/Monit, you can aggregate multiple standalone installations into one console.

After struggling with so many other systems that were complicated and burdensome and ultimately no better than nagios, I came across Monit and haven't looked back.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#85

Post by monitorman »

otterley wrote: post #83
monitorman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datadog may be okay if you're doing really simple stuff and not sending much data. Once you get to scale, you will need a system like Wavefront. Wavefront can take millions of data points per second, query on them super fast, and they don't go down. Every other monitoring system downsamples, or throws away your data after a certain amount of time.

We throw hundreds of thousands of metrics at Datadog per minute from thousands of hosts; it hasn't broken a sweat yet. Are you affiliated with Wavefront?

I'm a happy customer of Wavefront. I completely believe that Datadog can handle hundreds of thousands per minute -- especially if most of them are pre-canned, non-custom metrics grabbed by their agent. Hundreds of thousands of metrics/minute is a few thousand a second only. Wavefront does millions of custom metrics per second, which can be sent with different dimensions and tags. That's much harder.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#86

Post by ycdk »

We use a combination of metric monitors, with Wavefront being the leading monitoring solution - integration is smooth, the querying language is simple and powerful, the graphs render fast and their support is very helpful - even after the contract is signed :)

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#89

Post by jamtur01 »

mspaulding06 wrote: post #59
acd wrote: post #37

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...

I like Riemann and actually read The Art of Monitoring ( https://artofmonitoring.com/ ) which was a great book. There are two big downsides for me on this one. First, you MUST build your monitoring solution from scratch and you MUST learn Clojure (which can be hard to get a whole team to agree to). Second, there's no alerting dashboard, which makes it difficult to see the overall state of the clusters you're dealing…

You can alert via a number of mechanisms: email, PagerDuty, Slack et al, etc (I talk about most of those in Chapter 9).

I have never been very keen on alerting dashboards, I find they are rarely actually reviewed and flash red for days or weeks. :) So I only covered metrics/graphing as a console rather than a status console. If you want to add such a console it'd be easy to output Riemann events via an API to such a console.

Glad you enjoyed the book!

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#90

Post by jrv »

falcolas wrote: post #5

Just my opinion, but I won't use Prometheus, because of the active polling model. It won't scale without a number of workarounds. My preferred method is Icinga2 (a Nagios clone with better configuration and clustering built-in) with reports coming in via passive NSCA. Toss in Graphite (or I'm warming up to Grafana on Influx) with some ability to write alerts against those reported metrics, and you're as close to idea…

I want to understand more about why you think that pull doesn't scale. Borgmon at Google (the biggest scale ever) worked fine with a pull model, and as far as I know, the successor still pulls, too. A push model also has the problem that now the identity of each instance needs to be known by each instance itself, instead of only by the monitoring system via service discovery (which needs to know about what instances should exist and their identity anyways, otherwise how is it going to let you know that something is wrong?).

We also have an FAQ in Prometheus about why we prefer pull: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/faq/#why-do-you-pull...?

In my experience, pulling is operationally much nicer than pushing, and I've worked with both. It also gives you somewhat less of an accidental DDoS exposure.

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