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Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

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Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#61

Post by mspaulding06 »

solipsism wrote: post #58
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...

It should be noted that Riemann is different from Nagios and Prometheus in that it's push-based. The other two are primarily pull-based.

Yep, I think that is Riemann's greatest advantage. I don't like the fact that with Prometheus I have to set up some sort of service discovery mechanism. Right now we're using Foreman to manage our clusters, so most likely I would have to use the file service discovery type and query the Foreman API to produce a YAML or JSON file to provide a list of static hosts.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#62

Post by caw »

tayo42 wrote: post #40
Zenfinch wrote: post #10

If you can have a monitoring system in the cloud Datadog is a great choice. Good documentation, UI, many, many plugins and fair pricing (IMO). https://www.datadoghq.com/ (Im not affiliated with in any way other than using their product on a pet project with many moving parts).

Datadog was down so often when I had to use it. It felt so unreliable. We used to monitor hosts and it got to the point where checking if datadog was down was part of troubleshooting..

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 each service.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#63

Post by jaytaylor »

If you are okay with something which you don't have to run yourself-

The winner IMO is dataloop.io [0].

Dataloop is a SaaS monitoring solution that is super easy to get up and running and has tons of fantastic features and capabilities. The team behind it is stellar and their pricing is reasonable.

10/10, will continue to use again and again :)

[0] https://dataloop.io/

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#64

Post by eldavido »

I know I might come off as trolling, but try to get out of the business of managing servers. I've done it, it sucks, and I don't ever want to do it again.

Get everything containerized and use a container runtime like ECS, unless you're operating in analytics, adtech, or something else with extreme storage/compute/network requirements.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#65

Post by williamstein »

bqe wrote: post #44
williamstein wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make sure you understand their pricing (I didn't): http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/07/datadogs-pricing-dont-m...

How could their pricing page be clearer? It says per host in fairly large letters underneath it. I'm asking because I will be designing a similar page soon (that's also billed per host) and I'd like to avoid the same mistakes.

[EDIT: This pricing page by the top poster in this thread is way better than I suggest below -- https://www.serverdensity.com/pricing/]

1. VERY clearly state that when you sign up for the service, then you are on the hook for up to $18*500 = $9000 + tax in charges for any month. Even Google compute engine (and Amazon) don't create such a trap, and have a clear explicit quota increase process.

2. Instead of "HUGE $15" newline "(small light) per host", put "HUGE $18 per host" all on the same line. It would easily fit. I don't even know how the $15/host datadog discount could ever really work, given that the number of hosts might constantly change and there is no prepayment.

3. Inform users clearly in the UI at any time how much they are going to owe for that month (so far), rather than surprising them at the end. Again, Google Cloud Platform has a very clear running total in their billing section, and any time you create a new VM it gives the exact amount that VM will cost per month.

4. If one works with a team, 3 is especially important. The reason that I had monitors on 50+ machines is that another person working on the project, who never looked at pricing or anything, just thought -- he I'll just set this up everywhere. He had no idea there was a per-machine fee.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#66

Post by dmytton »

If you want to hand off all the hard stuff about monitoring and get some easy to use, core functionality (graphing, alerts, dashboards) then my company https://www.serverdensity.com has been going 7+ years now.

For highly sophisticated environments then https://www.datadog.com is a very advanced product.

Both are based off my original agent: https://github.com/serverdensity/sd-agent (DataDog forked it in 2010 and we forked them back last year).

We're also behind http://www.humanops.com trying to build monitoring that also helps you run on-call and ops teams generally in a way that considers fatigue, stress and the realities of the humans running IT systems! E.g. https://blog.serverdensity.com/introducing-alert-costs/ and https://opzzz.sh

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#67

Post by misframer »

postwait wrote: post #46

If you care about correctness of data, solid data retention and good analytics (prediction, forecasting, etc.) then you should take a look at Circonus. http://www.circonus.com/ 500 metrics accounts are free for life. Built by SREs for SREs.

postwait is the founder of Circonus.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#70

Post by walrus01 »

OpenNMS. It is a java memory pig but is used by some of the twenty largest ASNs (by CAIDA ASRANK) in north america. Truly open source and free. Very extensible. Large development community behind it and many constant updates.
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