Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
Hi Alan, This isn't exactly what you describe for your needs but have you considered using auto-remediation outside of the box? I've been using StackStorm https://stackstorm.com/ for the last year in an environment of ~1500 physical servers for this purpose and it's been quite successful. It has been handling cases like restarting SNMP daemons that segfault, hadoop instances that loose to contact with the ZooKeeper cluster, restarting nginx daemons that stop responding to requests by analysing the last write date in nginx's access logs, the list goes on. StackStorm is event driven platform that has many integrations available allowing it to interact with internal and external service providers. It's Python based and can use ssh to execute remote commands which sounds like an acceptable approach since you're using ansible. Connecting SNMP traps up to StackStorm's event bus to trigger automated responses based on the trap contents would be inline with common use cases. Regards, Carlos On 16/10/17 17:50, Alan McKinnon wrote: Nagios and I go way back, way way waay back. I now recommend it never be used unless there really is no other option. There is just so many problems with actually using the bloody thing, but let's not get into that:-) I have a full monitoring system that tracks and reports on the state of most things, but as it's a monitoring system it is forbidden to make changes of any kind at all, and that includes restarting failed daemons. Turns out that daemons that failed for no good reason are becoming more and more common in this day and age, mostly because we treat them like cattle not pets and use virtualization and containers so much. And there's our old friend the Linux oom-killer What I need here is a small app that will be a constrained, single-purpose watchdog. If a daemon fails, the watchdog attempts 3 restarts to get it going, and records the fact it did it (that goes into the big monitoring system as a reportable fact). If the restart fails, then a human needs to attend to it as it is seriously or beyond the scope of a watchdog. Like you, I'm tired of being woken at 2am because something dropped 1 ping when the nightly database maintenance fired up on the vmware cluster:-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On 10/16/2017 11:50 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > What I need here is a small app that will be a constrained, > single-purpose watchdog. If a daemon fails, the watchdog attempts 3 > restarts to get it going, and records the fact it did it (that goes into > the big monitoring system as a reportable fact). If the restart fails, > then a human needs to attend to it as it is seriously or beyond the > scope of a watchdog. > Can the daemon be run in the foreground? start-app; start-app; start-app; /usr/local/bin/page-alan
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On 16/10/2017 18:10, Ralph Seichter wrote: > On 16.10.2017 17:50, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> Nagios and I go way back, way way waay back. I now recommend it >> never be used unless there really is no other option. > > Have you tried Icinga 2 (*) yet? It originally started as a Nagios fork > and uses plugins to monitor, but the rule-based configuration mechanism > of Icinga 2 is IMO more powerful and easier than Nagios' mechanism. I've > used both Nagios and Icinga for years, and I definitely prefer Icinga 2. > > -Ralph > > (*) https://www.icinga.com/products/icinga-2/ > Yes, I know Icinga as well. It fixes many of Nagios' shortcomings - the first batch of commits after the fork took care of many of those - but still suffers from all of Nagios' design faults. In short, I'm not interested in going back to Nagios after a year's migration to get away from it. Same for Icinga, Shinken, Sensu and all the other many nagios forks out there. Also Zabbix. My current monitoring is snmp-based, and all I need monit for is as a very narrowly-defined single-purpose watchdog. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On 16.10.2017 17:50, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Nagios and I go way back, way way waay back. I now recommend it > never be used unless there really is no other option. Have you tried Icinga 2 (*) yet? It originally started as a Nagios fork and uses plugins to monitor, but the rule-based configuration mechanism of Icinga 2 is IMO more powerful and easier than Nagios' mechanism. I've used both Nagios and Icinga for years, and I definitely prefer Icinga 2. -Ralph (*) https://www.icinga.com/products/icinga-2/
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On 16/10/2017 17:41, Mick wrote: > On Monday, 16 October 2017 16:12:53 BST Alan McKinnon wrote: >> On 16/10/2017 17:08, Ian Zimmerman wrote: >>> On 2017-10-16 14:11, Alan McKinnon wrote: My needs here are pretty simple: local watchdog that checks if a program is running and restart it if not. If that fails 3 times or so, alert me. Maybe a few file/dir/fifo monitors as well. Not much else. I don't need any of monit's graphing features or M/monit, I have other tools for that. And mostly don't even need it's http API either. >>> >>> supervisor (aka supervisord) >>> >>> http://supervisord.org/ >>> >>> python based, not sure if that's okay with you >> >> I forgot about supervisord. Like monit, it runs everywhere and might be >> easier for the team-mates to understand and work with. >> >> Python is not a problem, all these hosts are ansible-managed anyway, so >> they all have to run python-2.7 >> >> Good find, thanks! > > I've used Nagios in the past, but have not kept up with its development and > the many plugins it provides. It could do any of the above tasks and much > more. It can run scripts (perl, or bash) via daemons (nrpe) on the remote > systems to restart applications, et al. The Nagios server possessed the > ability to set up quite intelligent monitoring and alert hierarchies with > multilayered comms structures to make sure you are not woken up at 2 a.m. by > your boss, just because a ping failed to his home NAS. I also found the logs > which can be also stored on SQL quite useful both in troubleshooting problems > and in producing reports. It can monitor network connectivity, remote OS > parameters and applications. Writing your own plugin/module to monitor quite > specialised use cases is not particularly difficult either. > > I expect you may find Nagios more complicated to set up than monit, at least > initially, but if you don't have the luxury of time to invest on setting up > Nagios monit may be a better fit. I don't have in depth experience with > other > monitoring software to comment, so something else may suit better your > specific needs. > Nagios and I go way back, way way waay back. I now recommend it never be used unless there really is no other option. There is just so many problems with actually using the bloody thing, but let's not get into that :-) I have a full monitoring system that tracks and reports on the state of most things, but as it's a monitoring system it is forbidden to make changes of any kind at all, and that includes restarting failed daemons. Turns out that daemons that failed for no good reason are becoming more and more common in this day and age, mostly because we treat them like cattle not pets and use virtualization and containers so much. And there's our old friend the Linux oom-killer What I need here is a small app that will be a constrained, single-purpose watchdog. If a daemon fails, the watchdog attempts 3 restarts to get it going, and records the fact it did it (that goes into the big monitoring system as a reportable fact). If the restart fails, then a human needs to attend to it as it is seriously or beyond the scope of a watchdog. Like you, I'm tired of being woken at 2am because something dropped 1 ping when the nightly database maintenance fired up on the vmware cluster :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On Monday, 16 October 2017 16:12:53 BST Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 16/10/2017 17:08, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > > On 2017-10-16 14:11, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> My needs here are pretty simple: > >> local watchdog that checks if a program is running and restart it if > >> not. If that fails 3 times or so, alert me. > >> Maybe a few file/dir/fifo monitors as well. Not much else. > >> > >> I don't need any of monit's graphing features or M/monit, I have other > >> tools for that. And mostly don't even need it's http API either. > > > > supervisor (aka supervisord) > > > > http://supervisord.org/ > > > > python based, not sure if that's okay with you > > I forgot about supervisord. Like monit, it runs everywhere and might be > easier for the team-mates to understand and work with. > > Python is not a problem, all these hosts are ansible-managed anyway, so > they all have to run python-2.7 > > Good find, thanks! I've used Nagios in the past, but have not kept up with its development and the many plugins it provides. It could do any of the above tasks and much more. It can run scripts (perl, or bash) via daemons (nrpe) on the remote systems to restart applications, et al. The Nagios server possessed the ability to set up quite intelligent monitoring and alert hierarchies with multilayered comms structures to make sure you are not woken up at 2 a.m. by your boss, just because a ping failed to his home NAS. I also found the logs which can be also stored on SQL quite useful both in troubleshooting problems and in producing reports. It can monitor network connectivity, remote OS parameters and applications. Writing your own plugin/module to monitor quite specialised use cases is not particularly difficult either. I expect you may find Nagios more complicated to set up than monit, at least initially, but if you don't have the luxury of time to invest on setting up Nagios monit may be a better fit. I don't have in depth experience with other monitoring software to comment, so something else may suit better your specific needs. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: monit and friends.
On 16/10/2017 17:08, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > On 2017-10-16 14:11, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> My needs here are pretty simple: >> local watchdog that checks if a program is running and restart it if >> not. If that fails 3 times or so, alert me. >> Maybe a few file/dir/fifo monitors as well. Not much else. >> >> I don't need any of monit's graphing features or M/monit, I have other >> tools for that. And mostly don't even need it's http API either. > > supervisor (aka supervisord) > > http://supervisord.org/ > > python based, not sure if that's okay with you > I forgot about supervisord. Like monit, it runs everywhere and might be easier for the team-mates to understand and work with. Python is not a problem, all these hosts are ansible-managed anyway, so they all have to run python-2.7 Good find, thanks! -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
