4 ms·

Service Canary – Detect and alert on changes within your infrastructure

74 points by Fizzadar 10y ago

kapauldo 10y ago
Is this like monit?
- kkirsche 10y ago
  Sounds like it. Wouldn't mind a more full featured monit. Didn't have good luck personally with Nagios
  - lwhalen 10y ago
    Check out Sensu.
  - aisofteng 10y ago
    OpenNMS works well.
- devonkim 10y ago
  From my casual browsing, I think that aside from a prettier UI it does a subset of what Monit can do at the moment and Service Canary seems to be based more around network changes than system-local changes. The messaging of Service Canary is not as comprehensive of a monitoring solution as Monit and implies that this kind of monitoring needs a distinct solution although Monit can probably do all of these things (file change detection, network event notification, etc.). Most monitoring systems are based around threshold ranges of measured values. Service Canary, like Monit, seems to be more oriented around event-based monitoring closer to what is done in logging infrastructures similar to an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or Sumologic based stack that will aggregate event / log data and derive numerical values that you can then alert upon. Monit is able to at least react to an event with a response, I don't really see much about event reactions for Service Canary.
daenney 10y ago
Mmm, PyPi doesn't seem to want to surface this package at all when searching for it through its web interface. I can't find anything actually named canaryd when searching. However, running a pip install does find it: Collecting canaryd Downloading canaryd-0.dev0.tar.gz Unfortunately it fails to build on my system: Building wheels for collected packages: canaryd Running setup.py bdist_wheel for canaryd ... error It seems the package is entirely empty and only declares a single dependency, ipdb. A hypothetical repository which could (will?) contain the code seems to live here: https://github.com/Oxygem/canaryd https://github.com/Oxygem/canaryd. It was set up 3 months ago but nothing since then. According to GitHub they detect the license as MIT.
- Fizzadar 10y ago
  The package on pypi is just a placeholder currently (although it should install OK, I'll check that). We're working on the full client right now which should be ready in the coming weeks :)
  - danudey 10y ago
    Why on earth would you post a website with a 'coming soon' email form and also broken instructions which interested people are presumably going to try immediately? Also, why upload a useless placeholder archive to PyPi in the first place?
godisdad 10y ago
Tripwire in the cloud?
jtwaleson 10y ago
We've been using etckeeper (/etc is a git repo so you can track changes) plus an after-commit hook to post to a chatbot. We alert on uncommitted changes after one hour via nagios and track authors with GIT_COMMITTER_* env variables. This is deployed to about 6000 machines. Works well.
davidu 10y ago
This appear to be a hybrid IDS w/ some SIEM capability.
mistermann 10y ago
Is there anything like this that supports windows?
- windowsworkstoo 10y ago
  OSSEC has an agent that works on Windows and with configuration can do this stuff.
godgod 10y ago
What other open-source alternatives to service canary are there? I would totally run this if I could run my own daemon internally.
jldugger 10y ago
Oh, because on-call needs _more_ alerts... :3

74 points by Fizzadar 10y ago

kapauldo 10y ago

Is this like monit?

kkirsche 10y ago
Sounds like it. Wouldn't mind a more full featured monit. Didn't have good luck personally with Nagios
- lwhalen 10y ago
  Check out Sensu.
- aisofteng 10y ago
  OpenNMS works well.
devonkim 10y ago
From my casual browsing, I think that aside from a prettier UI it does a subset of what Monit can do at the moment and Service Canary seems to be based more around network changes than system-local changes. The messaging of Service Canary is not as comprehensive of a monitoring solution as Monit and implies that this kind of monitoring needs a distinct solution although Monit can probably do all of these things (file change detection, network event notification, etc.). Most monitoring systems are based around threshold ranges of measured values. Service Canary, like Monit, seems to be more oriented around event-based monitoring closer to what is done in logging infrastructures similar to an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or Sumologic based stack that will aggregate event / log data and derive numerical values that you can then alert upon. Monit is able to at least react to an event with a response, I don't really see much about event reactions for Service Canary.

daenney 10y ago

Mmm, PyPi doesn't seem to want to surface this package at all when searching for it through its web interface. I can't find anything actually named canaryd when searching. However, running a pip install does find it: Collecting canaryd Downloading canaryd-0.dev0.tar.gz Unfortunately it fails to build on my system: Building wheels for collected packages: canaryd Running setup.py bdist_wheel for canaryd ... error It seems the package is entirely empty and only declares a single dependency, ipdb. A hypothetical repository which could (will?) contain the code seems to live here: https://github.com/Oxygem/canaryd https://github.com/Oxygem/canaryd. It was set up 3 months ago but nothing since then. According to GitHub they detect the license as MIT.

Fizzadar 10y ago
The package on pypi is just a placeholder currently (although it should install OK, I'll check that). We're working on the full client right now which should be ready in the coming weeks :)
- danudey 10y ago
  Why on earth would you post a website with a 'coming soon' email form and also broken instructions which interested people are presumably going to try immediately? Also, why upload a useless placeholder archive to PyPi in the first place?

godisdad 10y ago

Tripwire in the cloud?

jtwaleson 10y ago

We've been using etckeeper (/etc is a git repo so you can track changes) plus an after-commit hook to post to a chatbot. We alert on uncommitted changes after one hour via nagios and track authors with GIT_COMMITTER_* env variables. This is deployed to about 6000 machines. Works well.

davidu 10y ago

This appear to be a hybrid IDS w/ some SIEM capability.

mistermann 10y ago

Is there anything like this that supports windows?

windowsworkstoo 10y ago
OSSEC has an agent that works on Windows and with configuration can do this stuff.

godgod 10y ago

What other open-source alternatives to service canary are there? I would totally run this if I could run my own daemon internally.

jldugger 10y ago

Oh, because on-call needs _more_ alerts... :3