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Besides the fuzzy feeling of helping a open source project with comercial endeavors, how does it compare to services like Server Density, Nagios, Monit, etc?

by cicloid 15y ago

bradleyland 15y ago
I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon. We used to use a pay-per-month monitoring service, but I find the setup and maintenance of many services to be equal to the headache of maintaining something like Munin. The most obvious difference is that Amon runs on your hardware, so the data stays with you. The pricing model is fundamentally different than services like Server Density, New Relic, Scout, etc in that you pay per major version, rather than per-month. Amon is currently pre-1.0, so it's hard to compare with a mature service like Server Density. They're (Amon) no where near feature parity with SD. Then again, SD will quickly cost you many times the licensing cost of Amon when you're monitoring multiple servers. For me, the value judgement will have to wait. With services like Server Density you are (theoretically) offloading a lot of maintenance overhead to the SaaS provider. If Amon delivers on their "one line installer" promise, then it will at least have "effort parity" with many SaaS providers. I have to wait because they're pre-1.0, so while their software is inexpensive and easy to use, there is a distinct lack of critical features. If I'm making the evaluation (whether to roll this in to production) today, I can't live without alerts, so Amon is out. Based on the way things are looking, I'd say that Amon has a bright future though. I might buy an early release, just to get up to speed on it. Tangent: Where did you see that Amon is open source? I see that I can get access to the source by licensing it, but I don't see any mention of open source on the pages I viewed.
- 1stvamp 15y ago
  Re. amon being open source: https://github.com/martinrusev/amon https://github.com/martinrusev/amon
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon Amon Plus can monitor more than one machine. Also, on the open source thing, it's closer to open-core. The single-server version is open, but, if you want to monitor more than one box, you'll need the Plus version, which, despite being distributed with source, is not, AFAIK, open.
dmytton 15y ago
As this is self hosted, it leaves you to deal with all the management of things like alert delivery (e.g. ensuring delivery of e-mails, working with SMS gateways) and data retention. The MongoDB installation that Amon sets up is not in a replica set nor sharded, so it leaves you to deal with redundancy, failover and scaling. We use MongoDB for Server Density and I can tell you that managing huge quantities of data is not easy.

Besides the fuzzy feeling of helping a open source project with comercial endeavors, how does it compare to services like Server Density, Nagios, Monit, etc?

by cicloid 15y ago

Besides the fuzzy feeling of helping a open source project with comercial endeavors, how does it compare to services like Server Density, Nagios, Monit, etc?

bradleyland 15y ago

I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon. We used to use a pay-per-month monitoring service, but I find the setup and maintenance of many services to be equal to the headache of maintaining something like Munin. The most obvious difference is that Amon runs on your hardware, so the data stays with you. The pricing model is fundamentally different than services like Server Density, New Relic, Scout, etc in that you pay per major version, rather than per-month. Amon is currently pre-1.0, so it's hard to compare with a mature service like Server Density. They're (Amon) no where near feature parity with SD. Then again, SD will quickly cost you many times the licensing cost of Amon when you're monitoring multiple servers. For me, the value judgement will have to wait. With services like Server Density you are (theoretically) offloading a lot of maintenance overhead to the SaaS provider. If Amon delivers on their "one line installer" promise, then it will at least have "effort parity" with many SaaS providers. I have to wait because they're pre-1.0, so while their software is inexpensive and easy to use, there is a distinct lack of critical features. If I'm making the evaluation (whether to roll this in to production) today, I can't live without alerts, so Amon is out. Based on the way things are looking, I'd say that Amon has a bright future though. I might buy an early release, just to get up to speed on it. Tangent: Where did you see that Amon is open source? I see that I can get access to the source by licensing it, but I don't see any mention of open source on the pages I viewed.

1stvamp 15y ago
Re. amon being open source: https://github.com/martinrusev/amon https://github.com/martinrusev/amon
rbanffy 15y ago
> I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon Amon Plus can monitor more than one machine. Also, on the open source thing, it's closer to open-core. The single-server version is open, but, if you want to monitor more than one box, you'll need the Plus version, which, despite being distributed with source, is not, AFAIK, open.

dmytton 15y ago

As this is self hosted, it leaves you to deal with all the management of things like alert delivery (e.g. ensuring delivery of e-mails, working with SMS gateways) and data retention. The MongoDB installation that Amon sets up is not in a replica set nor sharded, so it leaves you to deal with redundancy, failover and scaling. We use MongoDB for Server Density and I can tell you that managing huge quantities of data is not easy.