We have a lot of data to parse through at 37signals. Our internal stats application, Dash, does the majority of heavy data lifting for us, including reports, application health, CI builds, and much more. Our Campfire bot named Tally happily pings us when a build fails, deploys are fired off, and when Nagios alerts pop up.
I had a problem though: I needed to have all of this data open constantly to absorb it. Either I had to look at the pages on Dash…
- giant robots smashing into other giant robots: Designer Tools
- A Fresh Cup: My Tools of the Trade - 2011
- New Relic: New Relic Alert Enhancements
- Ruby Inside: Thanking Ruby Inside's April and May 2011 Sponsors (Training, Haml Conversion and More)
- carpeaqua by Justin Williams: Christina Warren Shows Me Her Pixels
- PeepCode Products: Play by Play: Ryan Singer (UX)
…solutions. The components are designed to integrate seamlessly with widely deployed solutions such as Nagios and Cacti, and are delivered in the form of templates, plugins, and scripts.
* MySQL 5.6 compatibility for InnoDB graphs (bug 1124292)
* Added performance data to Nagios plugins (bugs 1090145, 1102687)
* Added UTC option to pmp-check-mysql-replication-delay to be compatible with pt-hearbeat 2.1.8+ (bug 1103364)
* Added 1-second granularity to pmp-check-mysql-deadlocks …
- Labnotes: Rounded Corners 372 — Message-Oriented Programming
- igvita.com: Cluster Monitoring with Ganglia & Ruby
- till's blog: Hosted MySQL: Amazon RDS (and backups)
- Engine Yard Developer Blog: 5 subtle ways you're using MySQL as a queue, and why it'll bite you
- New Relic: WordPress Performance Optimization
- A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #1014
And yet, how many of you are still using Nagios?
There are great advances in monitoring at the moment, and I enjoying watching them as someone who greatly benefits from them.
Yet, I'm worried that all these advances still don't focus enough on the single thing that's supposed to use them: humans.
There's lots of work going on to solve problems to make monitoring technology more accessible, yet I feel like we haven't solved the first problem at hand: to make monitoring …
- Lindsay Holmwood - auxesis' musings: Graphing collectd statistics in the browser with Visage
…existing levels. This is an artefact of an industry wide cargo culting of the alerting levels from Nagios, and these levels may not make sense in a modern monitoring pipeline with distinctly compartmentalised stages.
For example, the Nagios plugin development guidelines state that UNKNOWN from a check can mean:
Invalid command line arguments were supplied to the plugin
Low-level failures internal to the plugin (such as unable to fork, or open a tcp socket) that prevent it from …
When using Nagios, the check + notification infrastructure are generally collapsed into one compartment (with the exception of NRPE ).
Many monitoring pipelines start out with the data collection + storage infrastructure decoupled from the check infrastructure. Monitoring checks query the same targets that are being graphed, but:
Because the check intervals don't necessarily match up to the data collection intervals, it can be hard to correlate monitoring alerts to features …
- Lindsay Holmwood - auxesis' musings: Data failures, compartmentalisation challenges, monitoring pipelines
- Dead Programmer Society: LARubyConf 2009 - Jim Weirich - "The Grand Unified Thoery of Software Development
- CaelumObject Developers' Blog: REST is crawling: early binding and the web without hypermedia
- New Relic: The CAT's out of the bag!
- Merbist: Building and implementing a Single Sign-On solution
…Percona XtraDB Cluster node status using the following example command for Nagios config:
define command{
command_name check_pxc_node_status
command_line /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/pmp-check-mysql-status -l $USER3$ -p $USER4$ -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -x wsrep_local_state -C ‘!=' -w 4
}
To install packages you can use one of the following commands:
yum install percona-nagios-plugins percona-cacti-templates
apt-get install percona-nagios-plugins percona-cacti-templates …
…Tasseo is another one of them, a successful experiment of having an at-a-glance dashboard with the most important metrics in one convenient overview.
It'll still be a while until we see the ancient tools like Nagios, Icinga and others improve, but the competition is ramping up. Sensu is one open source alternative to keep an eye on.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the monitoring space evolves over the next two years.
- Mike Perham: 12 Gems of Christmas #11 - statsd-ruby
- Labnotes: Rounded Corners 273 — Don't park in the bike lane
- A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #837
- Signal vs. Noise: LINK: Our implementation of Statsd
- High Scalability: 3 Tips and Tools for Creating Reliable Billion Page View Web Services
- RailsTips by John Nunemaker: Hi My Name is John...
Make a resolution to automate in 2013. Attend one of our Chef Introductory workshops in a location near you. Workshop coursework covers:
local workstation set up with Chef and connection to a Chef Server.
Use Chef to automate installation of a Nagios server as a real world example.
Automate other common system tasks with Chef, including: User management and sudo permissions, NTP (including a local NTP server) and SMTP relaying with postfix. Each exercise will be instructor-led, …
- AkitaOnRails.com - English: Chatting with Adam Jacob
- SD Ruby Podcast: Episode 067: Cooking up a Cloud (with Chef & EC2)
- Brainspl.at: 4 years at Engine Yard, what a long strange trip it's been.
- A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #905
- Labnotes: Rounded Corners 333 - Amazeballs
- Jake Scruggs: Ruby Midwest 2010 Friday
…new streaming API . Everything you need to know about the new and exciting API.
Best quote on scalability I have come across: "Design for 20x capacity, implement for 3x capacity, deploy for ~1.5x capacity."
§ DevOps Borat :
Law of Murphy for devops: if thing can able go wrong, is mean is already wrong but you not have Nagios alert of it yet.
We reordered our versioning with the release of 10.12.0 to facilitate point releases that just contain bug fixes. Here is your first one.
MVPs
Phil Dibowitz contributed awesome improvements to knife that were released in 10.14.0, such as batching for knife cookbook upload -a .
Nagios cookbook hero Tim Smith helped find a couple of the bugs that we fixed in this release.
We're grateful you are both a part of the Chef community, and you are the co-MVPs for this release!
- RubyLearning Blog: Does ROR deployment deprive YOU of your sleep?
- JJinuxLand: PyCon: Lightning Talks
- Rails Dog: Generating Thousands of PDFs on EC2 with Ruby
- The Curiosity Project: Backing Up Your Data With Fog
- ZURB: Photos of the Team
- High Scalability: Ansible - A Simple Model-Driven Configuration Management and Command Execution Framework