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μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

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Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#11

Post by jerrac »

ahofmann wrote: post #9

I like the concept of simple monitoring. Simple means it is simple to install, simple to maintain and simple to use. For me, this is netdata. Netdata could be much more, but I just install it on whatever machine and never think about it again. And when something is strange on that machine, I go to http://localhost:19999 and look around.

Not sure I haven't run across it before, but this is the first time I've tried using Netdata. Looks like it is very good for metrics, at least in the 10 minutes I have spent installing it on my local desktop and poking around the ui there.

I'm not seeing anything in it for logs, though. I'm guessing it doesn't aggregate or do anything with logs? What do you use for log aggregation and analysis?

I'm very interested because I've been getting frustrated with the ELK Stack, and the Prometheus/Grafana/Loki stack has never worked for me. I'm really close to trying to reinvent the wheel...

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#12

Post by random3 »

it's 2023. Tracing has been around for 20 years(dtrace, x-trace https://cs.brown.edu/~rfonseca/pubs/xtr-nsdi07.pdf).

Very simple logging, if not structured, while not completely useless it's not very useful either. except for maybe showing some nice charts.

Any serious monitoring tool is useful when it can explain things and only tracing gives you causal information.

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#13

Post by zacmps »

sphars wrote: post #8
dave8088 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Everything” is a must have for me. It’s shocking that Windows doesn’t come with local search that works.

Microsoft has added basically the same functionality to Power Toys, called Run[0], taking heavy inspiration from Everything. But yeah this should be a built-in utility. [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

Does it read the ntfs journal? Because that's really what makes everything, everything.

It makes me wish I used a journaling filesystem on Linux too.

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#14

Post by nine_k »

I like the idea of simplicity and doing exactly what you need. And the single executable.

The words "stupid simple" and "C++" together make me scratch my head though. C++ itself is not simple, and you have to recompile if you need to change something (and sometimes you inevitably do), which is slow. I'd likely go with a relatively simple C program that embeds the FFI for RRDtool and other stuff, and embeds Lua, or, better yet, Janet. Then most of the thing could be written in these languages, and would be easy to tweak when need be. That would still allow for a single executable + a single config file, on top of the logic already embedded. (But the author went and built the thing, and I did not, so their solution so far outperforms mine.)

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#15

Post by [deleted] »

nine_k wrote: post #14

I like the idea of simplicity and doing exactly what you need. And the single executable. The words "stupid simple" and "C++" together make me scratch my head though. C++ itself is not simple, and you have to recompile if you need to change something (and sometimes you inevitably do), which is slow. I'd likely go with a relatively simple C program that embeds the FFI for RRDtool and other stuff, and embeds Lua, or, b…

[deleted]

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#16

Post by xrd »

ahofmann wrote: post #9

I like the concept of simple monitoring. Simple means it is simple to install, simple to maintain and simple to use. For me, this is netdata. Netdata could be much more, but I just install it on whatever machine and never think about it again. And when something is strange on that machine, I go to http://localhost:19999 and look around.

I've been struggling with graphana and netdata looks so much better.

Is this a tool where you can boot up the docker app and then connect a bunch of servers into a centralized dashboard? Or, is it better to think of netdata as a dashboard for a single server that permits monitoring of a bunch of processes only on that machine?

I'm not sure I understand whether agents can be configured to talk to a dashboard, or if you don't need to do that configuration because they expect to talk to localhost. I have a bunch of VMs running on a bunch of different random hardware and want a way to monitor those VMs (and perhaps the hosts as well).

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#17

Post by lost_tourist »

nine_k wrote: post #14

I like the idea of simplicity and doing exactly what you need. And the single executable. The words "stupid simple" and "C++" together make me scratch my head though. C++ itself is not simple, and you have to recompile if you need to change something (and sometimes you inevitably do), which is slow. I'd likely go with a relatively simple C program that embeds the FFI for RRDtool and other stuff, and embeds Lua, or, b…

c++ can be relatively simple if you don't throw in all the bells and whistles and stay away from template metaprogramming. I use it all the time. Sure compiles can be slow, but with proper file partitioning and creating libraries 95% of that can be controlled for.

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#18

Post by hadlock »

ahofmann wrote: post #9

I like the concept of simple monitoring. Simple means it is simple to install, simple to maintain and simple to use. For me, this is netdata. Netdata could be much more, but I just install it on whatever machine and never think about it again. And when something is strange on that machine, I go to http://localhost:19999 and look around.

Back in 2017 when I had a bunch of physical machines and unmanaged VMs we ended up putting netdata on the servers. The reason why was because most of the team was used to manually logging onto servers and diagnosing the issue manually.

The reason I liked it was because it exposes a standard Prometheus endpoint I can scrape and then view using something like Grafana. There are only about 20,000 Grafana dashboard modules available for netdata but generally you can find one that works for you. Having that prometheus endpoint allows you to springboard into the cloud and get like-metrics out of your cloud stuff as well, with a nice long historical data trail from your older/est machines.

Re: μMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)

#20

Post by roger_ »

I was recently looking for an ultra minimal monitoring solution for OpenWrt and other lightweight systems (Pi’s, etc.) and was disappointed not to find one that met my needs (negligible CPU, disk space and RAM).

I ended up hacking together a shell script to send data to Home Assistant (via MQTT) which runs on pretty much any system that has at least netcat: https://github.com/roger-/hass-sysmon

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