Hi Aaron,
This seems like a good discussion to have on the mailing list - so I've
moved it there...
On 8/25/2012 8:20 AM, aaron prayther wrote:
still being very ignorant of what assimilation is...
In lots of ways, we all are ;-) <waves hands/>
what i would like to see is something that makes it relatively easy to
monitor all the complexity of a cloud infrastructure as well as all
the instances and the services (often times custom developed) running
on them.
then in terms of nagios, we would need to be able to setup checks on
to not only check that the service is running but it is responding
with the correct output (example: web server is not only running but
responds with the correct info).
How complicated do you make these checks? With the current OCF (open
cluster framework) resource agents we have for web servers, we do an
HTTP GET, check the return code, and then compare the output it against
a REGEX. The default REGEX is something like </html>. For databases we
do a simple query. The default one does something simple like counting
the number of authenticated users in the database and make sure that it
is at least one. All these have timeouts. Each OCF resource agent gets
to tell you a default timeout for its operations.
The OCF resource agent API is quite good. There are probably something
like 80 or so resource agents written for this API. We could support
others APIs (and we will, like init scripts and so on), but I don't know
of anything that comes close in terms of capabilities, configurability,
and the ease of the agent telling you what it does and how to configure
it. In addition there is an active development community around them -
which is used and contributed to by Red Hat, SuSE, and lots of SysAdmins.
be able to take actions on thresholds: run a script, do something,
like notification.
Notification is definitely in the plan. May piggyback on some of
Nagios' notification mechanisms - and others. A good reason for that is
during a transition you don't want to administer two notification
mechanisms. Haven't decided yet. I know about thresholds, we could let
you set up some default ones and then customize for each system. Plans
are vague...
I know about the need for scripting - but don't have specific plans.
(even more vague). If we're monitoring a service with an OCF agent or
an init script, we also will eventually have the capability to start and
stop the resource in question. Start-order dependencies may be an
issue. We'lll blow up that bridge when we come to it...
and finally to make it "attractive" to management types, you'll need
some sort of front end / reporting system.
Yes. Our main goal is to make you and your management into heroes in
your organization. This requires some good reporting as well as great
admin capabilities.
and finally, the assumption i'm making about the whole thing is. as
we spin up instances, we tell assimilation something about the
activities of that instance and it automatically starts monitoring.
when the instance goes away, it would be nice if we could get it to
know if it was meant to go away or not and report accordingly.
There is plenty enough up in the air at this point that hearing what
you're interested in helps. With our stealth discovery, we could easily
recognize what you've planted onto the image, and then it should be
possible to automatically start the default monitoring actions for those
images. One of the strengths we /should /have is the ability to respond
dynamically to things like you need to in a cloud.
Thanks for asking!
-- Alan Robertson
[email protected]
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