Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
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Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
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Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#2Nice article, whose central message ("don't bundle your tools") is widely applicable to domains other than monitoring. Small, specialized tools that can be combined together is the very essence of the Unix philosophy.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#3So, what would a "small, sharp" monitoring tool look like that's compelling to customers? Just an agent, and the customer supplies their own notification and trend-reporting services?
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#4So, what would a "small, sharp" monitoring tool look like that's compelling to customers? Just an agent, and the customer supplies their own notification and trend-reporting services?
I think Pingdom applies to some extent. In particular because it allows you to get the raw data out which can then by imported into trending software or notification services elsewhere.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#5To some degree, the best "monitoring software" doesn't even monitor at all - it simply provides a framework for people to add their monitors to. To take one example I'm familiar with (though I'm sure this could be applied to the rest of the great monitoring systems) - Nagios is, at it's heart, a State-Tracking/Notification/Scheduling Engine. The fact that you can add commands like "ping" or "http test" or "Database Schema Verification" to the tasks that you are scheduling and tracking the state on, is almost incidental to the core of what Nagios does.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#6Could not agree more. This is the approach we've strived to take while building https://metrics.librato.com ... API access for everything, integration with popular OSS for metric collection (e.g. statsd, collectd), loosely coupled integration with complementary tools (e.g. Papertrail, Pagerduty), etc.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#7Could not agree more. This is the approach we've strived to take while building https://metrics.librato.com ... API access for everything, integration with popular OSS for metric collection (e.g. statsd, collectd), loosely coupled integration with complementary tools (e.g. Papertrail, Pagerduty), etc.
@josephruscio - I was >this< close to going back and giving a quick mention to Librato Metrics. You guys definitely "get" what I'm talking about. I like that you provide well-defined interfaces for easily getting data into and out of your application. You focus on trending and let other (better?) software handle the other stuff.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#8Sounds like Sensu (https://github.com/sensu/sensu) fits the requirements. It's a small monitoring framework that works in conjunction with Chef or Puppet, PagerDuty, Librato, Graphite, and others.
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#9Sounds like Sensu ( https://github.com/sensu/sensu ) fits the requirements. It's a small monitoring framework that works in conjunction with Chef or Puppet, PagerDuty, Librato, Graphite, and others.
Sensu came up several times in the recent monitoring discussion on devops-toolchain [0]. I'm going to try a setup with sensu, graphite, and collectd soon- like the one Sean Escriva described at ChefConf [1].
[0] https://groups.google.com/group/devops-toolchain/browse_thre... [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXxtdE-Paco
Re: Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
#10So, what would a "small, sharp" monitoring tool look like that's compelling to customers? Just an agent, and the customer supplies their own notification and trend-reporting services?