3 ms·

We tried Nagios a while back, before going to Orion. Nagios has some great structural ideas, but fell down in other areas (don't know all of them, that was bef

We tried Nagios a while back, before going to Orion. Nagios has some great structural ideas, but fell down in other areas (don't know all of them, that was before I came on board). We use Puppet to manage our Linux infrastructure and are testing Desired State Configuration for our Windows systems. Puppet and DSC solve a different problem than monitoring. Our tools span the gamut of aggregating and presenting data, to doing "heavy lifting" of things like installing patches, managing our load balancers, and removing bad query plans from our database servers. Our in-house tooling fills in gaps where existing tooling wasn't responsive enough or made it difficult to deal with certain edge cases. General purpose tools like Orion satisfy 80% of our use cases, but we are fanatical about performance and functionality so we want to fill in that additional 20%. In fact, the majority of our Orion monitors are custom script monitors, which we have to create ourselves as it is. If what we do can work for others (I've worked in several environments with Orion and had the same issues in each environment), that's a bonus. We've found we are building a significant number of these projects and that's why we are looking for a dedicated developer for our team.

dvanduzer 13y ago
I'll have to look at the overlap between Puppet's Windows tools and DSC. These are definitely distinct from monitoring, but monitoring configuration should be populated from the same configuration store as Puppet. (Sometimes Puppet is the configuration store.) I've never evaluated Orion in particular, but it's slightly puzzling if you're creating a lot of custom monitoring scripts. In the low-touch Nagios deployments I've seen, this is often because someone didn't understand good places to use macros, and centralize more of the parameters.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  The problem is due to history. Configuration systems have historically looked at config as bits-on-a-disk. Supervisor systems look at bits-in-memory. And they emerged and evolved independently. So there's pain points and impedance mismatches regardless of which one you start with. What's needed is a system that sees that configuration and supervision are the same problem: you have a directed graph of what a system can look like, plus a compare-and-repair mechanism to drag the system to that state frequently. I've personally looked at Chef, Puppet and Cfengine, none of which really does all of them the way I would like. http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reigning-in-chaos/ http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

dvanduzer 13y ago

I'll have to look at the overlap between Puppet's Windows tools and DSC. These are definitely distinct from monitoring, but monitoring configuration should be populated from the same configuration store as Puppet. (Sometimes Puppet is the configuration store.) I've never evaluated Orion in particular, but it's slightly puzzling if you're creating a lot of custom monitoring scripts. In the low-touch Nagios deployments I've seen, this is often because someone didn't understand good places to use macros, and centralize more of the parameters.

jacques_chester 13y ago
The problem is due to history. Configuration systems have historically looked at config as bits-on-a-disk. Supervisor systems look at bits-in-memory. And they emerged and evolved independently. So there's pain points and impedance mismatches regardless of which one you start with. What's needed is a system that sees that configuration and supervision are the same problem: you have a directed graph of what a system can look like, plus a compare-and-repair mechanism to drag the system to that state frequently. I've personally looked at Chef, Puppet and Cfengine, none of which really does all of them the way I would like. http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reigning-in-chaos/ http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...