5 ms·

Amon - Python-powered server monitoring, logging, error reporting with JSON API

76 points by jemeshsu 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Shank 15y ago
Really an easy installation.
someone13 15y ago
Pretty cool! Does anyone here have any "real-world" experience with this?
IgorPartola 15y ago
I wonder why they didn't use SNMP instead. It seems to be the standard for this type of thing.
- trafficlight 15y ago
  Yeah, but I wish the S actually meant Simple.
- Dobbs 15y ago
  I don't use SNMP neither do any other operations people I know. Its interface is complicated, hard to navigate and a pain to manage. It's still used for network monitoring since that is what routers and switches talk but most people use something else for everything else. I've see Ganglia, NRPE, Munin, custom servers and my personal favorite: bash scripts with graphite. None of these quite match what Amon is trying to do but they all can get you an approximation of it. I'm personally going to have to look more at Amon. It might end up installed shortly.
sciurus 15y ago
Discussion from two months ago- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991
antoncohen 15y ago
At first I was really excited about this, I've spent the last couple days thinking about how I would architect a similar setup. Integration of monitoring, trending, and logging. Good graphing without rrdtool. Looks good. Digging deeper I see issues. The free version is single server (monitors itself) and doesn't have alerting. Monitoring without alerting has its uses, but that's not what I'm looking for. Also, single server isn't what I want. There appears to be a planned payed version that supports multiple servers and alerting (check the page source for a link). In a previous HN discussion of Amon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991) it was mentioned that the install script had errors. Looking at the install script was the first thing I did. It's kind of insane. It's the kind of thing it might be OK to do on your own servers, but asking others to run it is really dangerous. The installer starts off by running "type dpkg &> /dev/null". If that exits cleanly is downloads a Debian version of the installer and executes it. If type doesn't exit cleanly it does the same check from rpm and runs the rpm version of the installer. dpkg is available in the standard Fedora repository. rpm is available in the standard Debian repositories. /etc/debian_version and /etc/redhat-release might be a better check. The installer goes on to download binaries on MongoDB and install them in /usr/local/mongodb. It puts the mongo client in /usr/bin. Does "apt-get install mongodb" not work? It consistently does "tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz > /dev/null". tar -v is verbose, why direct verbose output to /dev/null? The init scripts are the client and server, written in python. It works but that's odd, I want my executables in bin or sbin. There seems to be a general lack of systems understanding, which is not what I want from a system monitoring tool. If you are looking for server to accept and store application logs, check out logstash (http://logstash.net/ http://logstash.net/). It will accept pretty much any non-binary input on any protocol, convert it to JSON, and output it to pretty much any storage system using any protocol. E.g., input AMPQ -> output Redis, or input syslog -> output MongoDB. In includes graphing and searching of your logs if you use the default output storage.
- martin_rusev 15y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. For the Mongo installer - I really, really, really wanted to install it with one line of code, instead of writing 100 lines bash spaghetti, but that's not possible - it works on some distributions ( it works fine on Ubuntu 11.04+, but I always had problems with Ubuntu 10.10 and CentOS 5.5 ) and it doesn't work on others. The problem with the logging are not application logs in general. I started working on that module, not because I didn't like the way I store my log entries, but because - I wanted flexibility on a program level. Every programming language out there has a diverse set of datastructures, but the logging modules are always limited to strings and levels. So you can't really "personalize" and "humanize" your log entries and also - you have one additional step - to convert the log entries to strings. And that depending on the language is between 1 and 4-5 lines of code. And these lines really add up. I fixed the OS detection script, thanks for that
dotpot 15y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554814 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554814

76 points by jemeshsu 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Shank 15y ago

Really an easy installation.

someone13 15y ago

Pretty cool! Does anyone here have any "real-world" experience with this?

IgorPartola 15y ago

I wonder why they didn't use SNMP instead. It seems to be the standard for this type of thing.

trafficlight 15y ago
Yeah, but I wish the S actually meant Simple.
Dobbs 15y ago
I don't use SNMP neither do any other operations people I know. Its interface is complicated, hard to navigate and a pain to manage. It's still used for network monitoring since that is what routers and switches talk but most people use something else for everything else. I've see Ganglia, NRPE, Munin, custom servers and my personal favorite: bash scripts with graphite. None of these quite match what Amon is trying to do but they all can get you an approximation of it. I'm personally going to have to look more at Amon. It might end up installed shortly.

sciurus 15y ago

Discussion from two months ago- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991

antoncohen 15y ago

At first I was really excited about this, I've spent the last couple days thinking about how I would architect a similar setup. Integration of monitoring, trending, and logging. Good graphing without rrdtool. Looks good. Digging deeper I see issues. The free version is single server (monitors itself) and doesn't have alerting. Monitoring without alerting has its uses, but that's not what I'm looking for. Also, single server isn't what I want. There appears to be a planned payed version that supports multiple servers and alerting (check the page source for a link). In a previous HN discussion of Amon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991) it was mentioned that the install script had errors. Looking at the install script was the first thing I did. It's kind of insane. It's the kind of thing it might be OK to do on your own servers, but asking others to run it is really dangerous. The installer starts off by running "type dpkg &> /dev/null". If that exits cleanly is downloads a Debian version of the installer and executes it. If type doesn't exit cleanly it does the same check from rpm and runs the rpm version of the installer. dpkg is available in the standard Fedora repository. rpm is available in the standard Debian repositories. /etc/debian_version and /etc/redhat-release might be a better check. The installer goes on to download binaries on MongoDB and install them in /usr/local/mongodb. It puts the mongo client in /usr/bin. Does "apt-get install mongodb" not work? It consistently does "tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz > /dev/null". tar -v is verbose, why direct verbose output to /dev/null? The init scripts are the client and server, written in python. It works but that's odd, I want my executables in bin or sbin. There seems to be a general lack of systems understanding, which is not what I want from a system monitoring tool. If you are looking for server to accept and store application logs, check out logstash (http://logstash.net/ http://logstash.net/). It will accept pretty much any non-binary input on any protocol, convert it to JSON, and output it to pretty much any storage system using any protocol. E.g., input AMPQ -> output Redis, or input syslog -> output MongoDB. In includes graphing and searching of your logs if you use the default output storage.

martin_rusev 15y ago
Thank you for the feedback. For the Mongo installer - I really, really, really wanted to install it with one line of code, instead of writing 100 lines bash spaghetti, but that's not possible - it works on some distributions ( it works fine on Ubuntu 11.04+, but I always had problems with Ubuntu 10.10 and CentOS 5.5 ) and it doesn't work on others. The problem with the logging are not application logs in general. I started working on that module, not because I didn't like the way I store my log entries, but because - I wanted flexibility on a program level. Every programming language out there has a diverse set of datastructures, but the logging modules are always limited to strings and levels. So you can't really "personalize" and "humanize" your log entries and also - you have one additional step - to convert the log entries to strings. And that depending on the language is between 1 and 4-5 lines of code. And these lines really add up. I fixed the OS detection script, thanks for that

dotpot 15y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554814 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554814