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Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

datadoghq.com

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Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#32
post #28
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if i understand this right: - DogStatsD is running on my Server and is collecting data. - I can use "dogstatsd-ruby" to collect data from my (i.e.) Rails App. - DogStatsD reports Stats to your Service Datadog HQ (optional) - Pup is a small version of Datadog HQ that is running locally on my Server and connects directly to DogStatsD. - If i feel Pup doen't satisfy my needs, i can switch from Pup to Datadog HQ, get…

In a nutshell, yes. You can also contribute some of the features you need to pup if you are so inclined. We're on a mission to provide monitoring that doesn't suck, and we believe that making it easy and rewarding to instrument your app is an important step on the way.

Is Pup only designed to use it on my dev. machine to run it in my development environment, or can i use it on my production system? :)

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#33

This looks potentially interesting, but I can't really evaluate it without thorough and accurate documentation. It would be nice if there were more than just instructions for downloading it and a trivial use case. Without it, your work's not done.

I was able to get in running against an existing statsd installation trivially, and explore it to my heart's content on my existing metrics. And I can look at the source - what more do you want? That was the easiest 3rd-party dashboard setup I've ever experienced.

If your needs are trivial, then it's probably adequate. Not everyone's needs are, though. I'm trying to evaluate it in the context of needing an enterprise-grade dashboard solution, with tens of thousands of metrics across thousands of hosts, and robust filtering/aggregation capability.

To my knowledge nobody has really solved this problem yet in a satisfactory way, outside some closed-source solutions at big internet companies.

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to get in running against an existing statsd installation trivially, and explore it to my heart's content on my existing metrics. And I can look at the source - what more do you want? That was the easiest 3rd-party dashboard setup I've ever experienced.

If your needs are trivial, then it's probably adequate. Not everyone's needs are, though. I'm trying to evaluate it in the context of needing an enterprise-grade dashboard solution, with tens of thousands of metrics across thousands of hosts, and robust filtering/aggregation capability. To my knowledge nobody has really solved this problem yet in a satisfactory way, outside some closed-source solutions at big interne…

otterley - for that, you can take a look at http://datadoghq.com. We do all of the above.

Our service isn't free beyond 5 hosts, but is quite a bit cheaper than rolling and running your own or flying blind and facing the consquences. It's a hard problem, and we're on a mission to solve it for companies that don't start with goo* or end in *ook.

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#35
post #32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell, yes. You can also contribute some of the features you need to pup if you are so inclined. We're on a mission to provide monitoring that doesn't suck, and we believe that making it easy and rewarding to instrument your app is an important step on the way.

Is Pup only designed to use it on my dev. machine to run it in my development environment, or can i use it on my production system? :)

We designed pup to be first and foremost accessible to developers, but it will work just the same on production systems.

Once you get addicted to metrics and want more aggregation / graphing / alerting / analysis capabilities, there's a number of open-source components you can pipe your statsd data into. Or you can use our own http://datadoghq.com service for that.

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your needs are trivial, then it's probably adequate. Not everyone's needs are, though. I'm trying to evaluate it in the context of needing an enterprise-grade dashboard solution, with tens of thousands of metrics across thousands of hosts, and robust filtering/aggregation capability. To my knowledge nobody has really solved this problem yet in a satisfactory way, outside some closed-source solutions at big interne…

otterley - for that, you can take a look at http://datadoghq.com . We do all of the above. Our service isn't free beyond 5 hosts, but is quite a bit cheaper than rolling and running your own or flying blind and facing the consquences. It's a hard problem, and we're on a mission to solve it for companies that don't start with goo* or end in *ook.

I looked at Datadog, but they still suffer from the same malady everyone else does: inspired by Cacti and Graphite, they use a flat namespace for metric names (e.g. interfaces.eth0.pkts) and host is the only supported dimension you can query against. Unfortunately, none of the monitoring and analytics startups I'm aware of have support for arbitrary dimensions you can query or aggregate against (host, interface, disk, datacenter, etc.).

Without some understanding of the dimensions of the data, it is very difficult to compose dashboards or aggregation rules that have arbitrary filters or can update automatically when new components are added.

I really ought to elaborate in a blog post someday :)

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

otterley - for that, you can take a look at http://datadoghq.com . We do all of the above. Our service isn't free beyond 5 hosts, but is quite a bit cheaper than rolling and running your own or flying blind and facing the consquences. It's a hard problem, and we're on a mission to solve it for companies that don't start with goo* or end in *ook.

I looked at Datadog, but they still suffer from the same malady everyone else does: inspired by Cacti and Graphite, they use a flat namespace for metric names (e.g. interfaces.eth0.pkts) and host is the only supported dimension you can query against. Unfortunately, none of the monitoring and analytics startups I'm aware of have support for arbitrary dimensions you can query or aggregate against (host, interface, disk…

otterley - Don't walk away yet... we do support arbitrary dimensions!

You can attach any arbitrary set of tags to metrics or events - on a per-datapoint basis, and slice / dice / alert based on those tags. Datadog will automatically tag your points by chef role or AWS availability-zone, for example, and you can add any other tag you want. Tags also don't have to be tied to a host and can also relate to a specific volume, mysql index, etc...

(Note to HN, this is a feature of datadoghq - pup will gladly collect and filter on tags, but won't aggregate them, yet)

Re: Show HN: Pup, real-time app metrics with Statsd

#40
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at Datadog, but they still suffer from the same malady everyone else does: inspired by Cacti and Graphite, they use a flat namespace for metric names (e.g. interfaces.eth0.pkts) and host is the only supported dimension you can query against. Unfortunately, none of the monitoring and analytics startups I'm aware of have support for arbitrary dimensions you can query or aggregate against (host, interface, disk…

otterley - Don't walk away yet... we do support arbitrary dimensions! You can attach any arbitrary set of tags to metrics or events - on a per-datapoint basis, and slice / dice / alert based on those tags. Datadog will automatically tag your points by chef role or AWS availability-zone, for example, and you can add any other tag you want. Tags also don't have to be tied to a host and can also relate to a specific vol…

But tags aren't dimensions. Tags are merely a list of dimensionless values and completely lack context that are essential for dashboard construction and value aggregation.

Suppose I apply the tags "ord", "foo.example.com" and "bar.example.org" to a metric. How does the dashboard builder or the aggregator know what they are? They're values without the fields.

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