John Vincent (@lusis), like a sizeable number of people is convinced
that Monitoring Sucks. I wholeheartedly agree and I don't think I've
found a sysadmin yet who would beg to differ. Every tool out there has
its pros and cons, often designed to resolve a particular con of another
tool, however they seem to end up losing out in other ways. In typical
sysadmin fashion, we write little additions to 'make it work' as we
need, or even just accept and have an ongoing irritation "if only it
would...". It seems utterly bizarre to me that something we all
fundamentally rely on is something we've not managed to fix so far :)
That said, I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer and I wouldn't have the
faintest clue where to start to actually fix monitoring and suspect that
applies to a fair number of us.
As it is, I tend to end up relying on a blend of tools to suit different
aspects of monitoring, currently Nagios (primarily Boolean checks),
Zabbix (resource checks, e.g. cpu usage, mail checks, basic website
monitoring) and Cacti (network graphing). It seems in almost every
DevOps presentation, blog or vlog I've seen, I end up hearing about yet
another custom in-house monitoring tool that the company wrote to handle
a shortcoming, and particularly a fondness for real-time detailed
metrics (with lots of love for Graphite graphing tool)
Instead of just moaning, and noticing that various groups were starting
to code, John's decided to see if he could do something about pulling it
together, and organised an IRC meeting today to try to start some good
discussion amongst various interested parties.
He's put a write up of the first meeting here:
http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2011/07/monitoring-sucks-watch-your-language.html
I'm rather interested to see how this one rolls out. Hopefully with a
good wide spread of interest and talents we could finally get a
monitoring tool that doesn't actually suck!
Paul
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