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Friday, October 12, 2012

What I want in a monitoring tool

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I started a new job a few weeks ago, and I'm now at a point where I'm investigating monitoring options. At past jobs I used Nagios, which I know will work, but I would like to look into other more modern tools. I am aware that #monitoringsucks, and I am pretty sure people have hashed these topics before, but here are some of the things I want from a modern monitoring tool:


  • Ideally open source, of if not affordable per host per month pricing (we already signed up as a paying customer of Boundary for example)

  • Installation and configuration should be easily scriptable



    • server installation, as well as addition/modification of clients should be easily automated so it can be done with Puppet/Chef

    • API would be ideal



  • Robust notifications/alerting rules



    • escalations

    • service dependencies

    • event handler scripts

    • alerts based on subsets of hosts/services



      • for example alert me only when 2+ servers of the same type are down





  • Out-of-the-box plugins



    • database-specific checks for example



  • Scalability



    • the monitoring server shouldn't become a bottleneck as more clients are added



      • nagios is OK with 100-200 clients (with passive checks)



    • hierarchy of servers should be supported

    • agent-based clients



  • Reporting/dashboards



    • Hosts/services status dashboards

    • Downtime/outages dashboards

    • Latency (for HTTP checks)



  • Resource graphing would be great



    • but in my experience very few tools do both alerting and resource/metrics graphing well

    • in the past I used Nagios for alerting and Ganglia/Graphite for graphing



  • Integration with other tools



    • Send events to graphing tools (Graphite), alerting tools (PagerDuty), notification mechanisms (irc, Campfire), logging tools (Graylog2)




I also asked a question on Twitter about what monitoring tool people would recommend, and here are some of the tools mentioned in the replies:


  • Sensu

  • OpenNMS

  • Icinga

  • Zenoss

  • Riemann

  • Ganglia

  • Datadog


Several people told me to look into Sensu, and a quick browsing of the home page tells me it would be worth giving it a whirl. So I think I'll do that next. Stay tuned, and also please leave a comment if you know of other tools that might fit the profile I am looking for.



Update: more tools mentioned in comments or on Twitter after I posted a link to this blog post:


  • New Relic (which I am actually in the process of evaluating, having paid for 1 host)

  • Circonus

  • Zabbix

  • Server Density

  • Librato

  • Comostas

  • OpsView

  • Shinken

  • PRTG

  • NetXMS

  • Tracelytics







via http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-i-want-in-monitoring-tool.html

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