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Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

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Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#71

Post by monitorman »

caw wrote: post #62
tayo42 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Datadog may be okay if you're doing really simple stuff and not sending much data. Once you get to scale, you will need a system like Wavefront. Wavefront can take millions of data points per second, query on them super fast, and they don't go down. Every other monitoring system downsamples, or throws away your data after a certain amount of time.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#72

Post by williamstein »

dmytton wrote: post #66

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…

dmytton you have done a FANTASTIC job on your pricing page (https://www.serverdensity.com/pricing/)! I just got screwed by DataDog's confusing pricing page (http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/07/datadogs-pricing-dont-m...). Your's is the ultimate example of what to do right. WOW.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#73

Post by dmytton »

williamstein wrote: post #72
dmytton wrote: post #66

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…

dmytton you have done a FANTASTIC job on your pricing page ( https://www.serverdensity.com/pricing/ )! I just got screwed by DataDog's confusing pricing page ( http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/07/datadogs-pricing-dont-m... ). Your's is the ultimate example of what to do right. WOW.

Thanks! We just recently released this new pricing page as a test. We've done a few iterations over the years and patio11 did a great writeup at http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#74

Post by nickpsecurity »

dmytton wrote: post #66

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…

"generally in a way that considers fatigue, stress and the realities of the humans running IT systems!"

I've been pushing for that to be included in more scheduling systems for production workers. Very awesome to see it considered in your work! :)

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#76

Post by gbrayut »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #34
jc4p wrote: post #24

At Stack Overflow we use a homebuilt Go solution called bosun: http://bosun.org/ -- it runs on pretty much anything and lets us incorporate data from windows machines / linux machines in one place.

I recently tried out Bosun and liked it a lot. The documentation is a little light, and the dependency on hbase and hadoop (since opentsdb uses that) is a bit of a pain. Maintaining those isn't particularly straight forward or fun. I'm also interested in prometheus but haven't gotten to try it out yet. Anyone reading this have experience with both? How do they compare?

We've been dogfooding the new Stack Overflow Documentation system for Bosun, so you may find some better examples at http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/bosun/topics which just opened yesterday. If you see anything missing you can request a topic or flag an example as needs improvement.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#77

Post by athenot »

dozzie wrote: post #49
falcolas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always a server. Regardless of how far away you've abstracted it away, there's always a server which should probably be monitored (even if to know when it's about to fail and should have work shunted off it prior to its failure). Icinga and others make it easy to programmatically add and remove servers as they enter and leave your environment. Even if you don't have access to the server so you can monitor it,…

> There's always a server. Actually, no. When you monitor state of a cluster (e.g. node count), you don't have a server, you have plenty of servers and a cluster (completely different thing). When you monitor temperature in your server room, you don't have a server, you have a server room. When you monitor exchange rate, you don't have a server. When you monitor a website, you still don't have a server. And now add a…

True but in practice it doesn't really matter. With sensu, you have offbox checks, and you just pick some internal server (there's always some "misc" server hanging around).

What matters is that the alert about the issue is raised and relayed to the proper notification channels. Since sensu doesn't concern itself with a fancy dashboard, it doesn't really matter if the alert pertains to the host or not.

Any decent monitoring will have customized the alert handling based on what's alerting, so there's some amount of post-processing possible.

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#78

Post by jpitz »

illicium wrote: post #53
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...

Riemann is a generic event processor. You can use it to generate alerts or aggregate metrics, but you still need something like collectd or telegraf to collect system/app stats from each machine and send it to Riemann.

Riemann comes with collection clients as well

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#79

Post by enricobruschini »

Hi all, I'm surely biased as I work at Instana (https://www.instana.com), but here's my opinion about monitoring.

Applications are dramatically and rapidly changing, with continuous delivery, microservice approach, containers and orchestration tools, things are all over and you might have a component spun up and down within few minutes. Humans cannot keep up with data and it doesn't make any sense to stare at a big screen full of data, just looking the all day at charts trying to visually correlate data. The correlation of data is becoming harder and harder as systems are more and more resilient. There's, therefore, no unique root cause anymore (https://www.instana.com/blog/no-root-cause-microservice-appl...).

At Instana we're re-defining what monitoring means. We're moving the bar from visualizing data to providing plain English explanation of what's going together with suggestion for remediation. Instana 3 main values are: - Automatic Discovery: dynamically models the architecture of infrastructure, middleware and services - Automatic QoS Analysis: continuously derives KPIs of all components and services and alerts on incidents - Integrated Investigation: visualizes in real-time physical and logical architecture, compares over time, suggests fixes and optimizations.

Happy to get feedback and provide more info. Enrico

Re: Ask HN: Best monitoring system?

#80

Post by moehm »

Most people here are recommending Prometheus. What is the best monitoring system to monitor good old infrastructure software like DNS servers, IMAP/SMTP server etc? Is Prometheus a reasonable choice for those as well?
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