Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

techcrunchit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#11

Post by thaumaturgy »

chrismiller wrote: post #7

I'm currently using Cloudkick's 1 server developer plan. I would really love to use them to monitor all of our servers but their current plans don't work for us. We use lots of tiny instances and virtual machines. This means for us the cost of Cloudkick for each VM would be around the actual monthly cost of that VM. If you have are in a different position to myself and are using larger instances then I would recommen…

We use Nagios on one of our Linodes to do our server monitoring. It's set up to do nearly constant monitoring; the last time we had a glitch, I received a text message about high CPU load before the graph at Linode had even updated to show the spike.

That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs us nothing, and gives us most of CloudKick's features, in our specific case.

Given their pricing, I think I'd rather take that money each month and pay someone to contribute to Nagios instead. :-/

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#13

Post by psadauskas »

joevandyk wrote: post #4

Anyone use Cloudkick here? On EC2? Recommended?

Maybe I'm too opinionated about the whole thing, but I have yet to find a cloud management solution that does things the way I want. Cloudkick, Rightscale, Chef, all seem to work ok, if you're willing to buy in to their preferred way of doing things. If you want to stray from that, though, its a lot of work, and brittle.

I don't know that they're wrong, and I'm right, exactly, but it feels like they're all trying to paper over the features and drawbacks of cloud, and making it act more like traditional hardware that people are more familiar.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#14

Post by bobfunk »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #11
chrismiller wrote: post #7

I'm currently using Cloudkick's 1 server developer plan. I would really love to use them to monitor all of our servers but their current plans don't work for us. We use lots of tiny instances and virtual machines. This means for us the cost of Cloudkick for each VM would be around the actual monthly cost of that VM. If you have are in a different position to myself and are using larger instances then I would recommen…

We use Nagios on one of our Linodes to do our server monitoring. It's set up to do nearly constant monitoring; the last time we had a glitch, I received a text message about high CPU load before the graph at Linode had even updated to show the spike. That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs…

We use Nagios combined with Ganglia for webpop.com as well and it's a great solution.

But if we weren't on a tight budget (we're bootstrapped) I would have gone with something like CloudKick no doubt.

The server for Nagios might be cheap, but installing, refining and updating our monitors does take time that could be used on developing our product instead.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#17

Post by michaelbuckbee »

joevandyk wrote: post #4

Anyone use Cloudkick here? On EC2? Recommended?

Recommended. We monitor about 30 servers with them (Rackspace Cloud). I consider them to be one more piece of the sysadmin replaced with a SASS solution. While you certainly could setup Nagios or whatever else for monitoring all of your machines, it's incredibly easy and far less maintenance to let CloudKick handle things.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#19

Post by ddispaltro »

psadauskas wrote: post #13
joevandyk wrote: post #4

Anyone use Cloudkick here? On EC2? Recommended?

Maybe I'm too opinionated about the whole thing, but I have yet to find a cloud management solution that does things the way I want. Cloudkick, Rightscale, Chef, all seem to work ok, if you're willing to buy in to their preferred way of doing things. If you want to stray from that, though, its a lot of work, and brittle. I don't know that they're wrong, and I'm right, exactly, but it feels like they're all trying to…

We are trying to create a new way of doing things, right now we have a lot more on the monitoring side of coin; however, projects like cast are some of the next generation of tooling for CK. http://github.com/cloudkick/cast

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) hits 1,000,000 servers

#20

Post by sanswork »

joevandyk wrote: post #4

Anyone use Cloudkick here? On EC2? Recommended?

Monitoring just under 50 servers with them on GoGrid. Just started actually and setup has been a breeze. We ran a nagios installation for a long time but the time and effort spent on running, updating and installing it just made it not worth the effort for us.

We have it linked in with PagerDuty now as well.

Post reply on HN