6 ms·

Amon.cx: New Server monitoring beta to compare with New Relic

59 points by marquis 13y ago

thibaut_barrere 13y ago
If you compare with New Relic, will Amon show the bottlenecks and slow transactions in Ruby code?
- glynjackson 13y ago
  Nothing in their road map: http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general They state its free in the BETA period so I'll give it a try. Pricing looks good too. Monitoring memory on an EC2 instance is tricky at times.
- ergo14 13y ago
  App Enlight will do this - but for now only python client supports this officially.
rschmitty 13y ago
There is also http://www.graphdat.com/ http://www.graphdat.com/ for another light weight server monitoring (first server free!) While both are great, I think New Relics value is in all the application details you can get for "free"
- gk1 13y ago
  There's also Scalyr (https://www.scalyr.com https://www.scalyr.com), built by two ex-Google devops engineers. (Full disclosure, I work for them.) There's no shortage of options out there. What we've heard from people is that while New Relic is powerful, it has a steeper learning curve and can be cumbersome for small/medium companies. I suspect that's why many alternatives are popping up.
  - rschmitty 13y ago
    Also their pricing.. The company I work for has no problem paying but my side projects where I'd like the same level of visiblity.. I just can't justify the cost Thanks for the link on Scalyr, will definitely check it out. Btw, it wouldnt hurt to throw up some pictures on your site :)
    - gk1 13y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! :) Many others seem to agree with you about the graphics, so we're definitely working that into our re-design, which is in progress now. I hope you try us out anyway!
aioprisan 13y ago
This is equivalent to the server monitoring of the New Relic platform, but not the application monitoring side of things, which I think is what most people pay New Relic for.
- sdfjkl 13y ago
  If you just want quick & cheap server monitoring -aaS, there's http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/, with a pretty straightforward Python plugin system for your custom metrics. None of this compares to what New Relic gets you with their deep code introspection. Server monitoring is just an additional gimmick you get with it, mostly because its nice to have all your metrics in one place when you hunt down a problem (there's a CloudWatch forwarder than fetches you all manner of AWS metrics into NR too).
  - hbeaver 13y ago
    +1. I've used Cloudkick (before Rackspace), Copperegg (not too bad either) and New Relic. Server Density is VERY reasonably priced, simple and gets the job of server monitoring done. The custom metrics are key. New Relic for example doesn't support custom metrics. A custom metric example: my Sidekiq queue sizes. When Sidekiq first came out, there was no way to alert/monitor this. It only took a few hours of Python.
    - sdfjkl 13y ago
      New Relic has custom metrics: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-collection http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-collect... What they are lacking in comparison to running your own NMS (e.g. NetXMS or Zabbix) is making custom views (the Dashboard feature in NR is pretty useless).
    - cpsaltis 13y ago
      If you liked Cloudkick I think you should also check out https://mist.io https://mist.io. In fact we started mist.io when Cloudkick was about to close down. We like to think of it as mobile friendly Cloudkick with a twist.
okal 13y ago
Is it no longer open source? We considered using the FOSS version, but ultimately went with a monitoring SaaS.
- ajaxaddicted 13y ago
  There is still an Open source version :https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone
  - citruspi 13y ago
    The difference between the hosted version and the open source version is that the latter can only monitor a single server - you'd need to run a copy of the open source version for each server you have.[0] [0]: http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/ http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/
ajaxaddicted 13y ago
Martin Rusev here, the guy behind Amon. I just want to provide a little bit more information about where the project is headed. First I want to clarify that Amon is not a new project. It has been in development for 2 years now, the SaaS version is in Beta, but I consider the underlying technology pretty stable and mature. My big goal with Amon is to move beyond monitoring into server analytics and recovery. That means - to analyze the data and send meaningful, troubleshoot friendly alerts that show the whole server state, not just "your cpu usage is > 70%". On recovery - The idea behind is to automate simple sysadmin tasks, like cleaning up log files, restarting a process, etc. As an example - if you have an alert: mysql is down for 5 minutes, execute: service mysql start
- sdfjkl 13y ago
  Sorry, but those are terrible examples. If your processes keep crashing, you should find and fix the underlying problem, or if you're forced to use unstable software, rely on something like upstart or daemontools to keep it running. And if your apache logs regularly fill your disk, add them to logrotate.
  - ajaxaddicted 13y ago
    Sorry about the examples, the general idea is that you can execute a command on the server when there are alerts for a specific problem. Upstart and daemontools can't keep your processes running. For this specific task there are tools like Monit, God, Puppet to some extend
    - sdfjkl 13y ago
      Perhaps a better example would be automating a previously manual failover, i.e. if a service becomes unavailable on one machine, start it on the warm standby. Or in EC2, terminate an instance and start a new one.
    - jlogsdon 13y ago
      Upstart can indeed keep your process running. We use it for all of our process monitoring and it works like a charm.
berkay 13y ago
Promising project but the New relic comparison is misguided. New Relic does have server monitoring but it's core strength is in application layer with agents for java, ruby, .net, python, php applications.
- gtaylor 13y ago
  Indeed. Their application metrics have been incredibly useful for us at Pathwright. It's nice always knowing what views are slow, which comprise the bulk of our CPU time. The SQL time breakdowns are handy to. You can, of course, do all of these things on your own without New Relic, but a small team like us needs to be spending time on other things (like pushing the product forward).
- drig 13y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. NewRelic is actually pretty bad at saying "your server is down". But, it's incredible at saying "Your landing page is loading slowly because the time it takes to load your data from MySQL is slow. Oh, and here's the offending query." Different things.
  - jlogsdon 13y ago
    Adding in the ability to mark when a deploy goes out makes it really easy to see when deploys caused issues historically (and immediately for those not involved with the deploy itself).
tbarbugli 13y ago
New Relic server monitor sucks really bad, they do app monitor really well. Real competitors would be Datadog/Scalyr
- gk1 13y ago
  Thanks for the shout-out! I'm on the https://www.scalyr.com https://www.scalyr.com team and am here if anyone has questions/feedback/suggestions. It grew out of our own frustration with the available tools, exactly as you express.
  - gandalfu 13y ago
    I would be nice if you had screenshots of the UI...
    - gk1 13y ago
      Thanks for that feedback. We're redesigning the homepage now and will include more screenshots. You can check out the live demo in the meantime to see it in action (the app UI will also get a facelift soon): http://goo.gl/BZ5GNd http://goo.gl/BZ5GNd
    - snewman 13y ago
      (Scalyr founder here) Thanks for the feedback. Agreed, we haven't done much to present the product yet. For the last couple of years, we've been focusing on building out the product while keeping our early users happy -- making sure we can walk the walk before we talk the talk. We'll be launching a completely new home page in a month or so that should do a much better job of presenting what we do. In the meantime, if anyone out there is frustrated with the current monitoring offerings, drop us a line (I'm steve@$COMPANY.com). We have a lot to offer, and we'll go the extra mile and beyond on support.
- jaryd 13y ago
  Don't forget ServerDensity :)
- rburhum 13y ago
acallaghan 13y ago
This is really nice, especially the integration with Digital Ocean, really fast setup
vincentkriek 13y ago
I don't like the install script you use. First of all you use sudo hardcoded in the script, it makes me nervous about what you are going to do on my server. I know it's nonsense because a deb can do about anything you want, but it would make me feel better.
- ajaxaddicted 13y ago
  You can install it manually. It's one small python daemon + 1 config file: apt-get install sysstat python-devel git clone https://github.com/amonapp/amonagent python setup.py install cp amon-agent.conf /etc/amon-agent.conf
dewey 13y ago
FYI, small typo on the front page: "dataand"
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
openmammon 13y ago
it's worth pointing out that new relic does not charge for server monitoring (SmartOS, *Nix, Windows). It's a free product and doesn't matter if you have one server or 100,000 or where they're hosted. https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server
ricardobeat 13y ago
/* GLOBAL */ .column { width: 1280px; Noooooo! 1280px is not a reasonable minimum screen width.
abimaelmartell 13y ago
i made something similar, but multiplatform -> https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor
otterley 13y ago
Your competition is Datadog, not New Relic.
sandstrom 13y ago
A similar product is https://skylight.io https://skylight.io, built by some very formidable people (only a Ruby apps yet though). https://serverdensity.io https://serverdensity.io is another great product! I don't want to take the spotlight away from Amon here, it looks like a good product and the idea of focusing on meaningful analysis is nice (instead of only storing droves of raw stats).
ergo14 13y ago
Lots of people mention New Relic application monitoring - One of the alternatives that I've created is App Enlight - https://appenlight.com https://appenlight.com - giving you application level visibility

59 points by marquis 13y ago

thibaut_barrere 13y ago

If you compare with New Relic, will Amon show the bottlenecks and slow transactions in Ruby code?

glynjackson 13y ago
Nothing in their road map: http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general They state its free in the BETA period so I'll give it a try. Pricing looks good too. Monitoring memory on an EC2 instance is tricky at times.
ergo14 13y ago
App Enlight will do this - but for now only python client supports this officially.

rschmitty 13y ago

There is also http://www.graphdat.com/ http://www.graphdat.com/ for another light weight server monitoring (first server free!) While both are great, I think New Relics value is in all the application details you can get for "free"

gk1 13y ago
There's also Scalyr (https://www.scalyr.com https://www.scalyr.com), built by two ex-Google devops engineers. (Full disclosure, I work for them.) There's no shortage of options out there. What we've heard from people is that while New Relic is powerful, it has a steeper learning curve and can be cumbersome for small/medium companies. I suspect that's why many alternatives are popping up.
- rschmitty 13y ago
  Also their pricing.. The company I work for has no problem paying but my side projects where I'd like the same level of visiblity.. I just can't justify the cost Thanks for the link on Scalyr, will definitely check it out. Btw, it wouldnt hurt to throw up some pictures on your site :)
  - gk1 13y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! :) Many others seem to agree with you about the graphics, so we're definitely working that into our re-design, which is in progress now. I hope you try us out anyway!

aioprisan 13y ago

This is equivalent to the server monitoring of the New Relic platform, but not the application monitoring side of things, which I think is what most people pay New Relic for.

sdfjkl 13y ago
If you just want quick & cheap server monitoring -aaS, there's http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/, with a pretty straightforward Python plugin system for your custom metrics. None of this compares to what New Relic gets you with their deep code introspection. Server monitoring is just an additional gimmick you get with it, mostly because its nice to have all your metrics in one place when you hunt down a problem (there's a CloudWatch forwarder than fetches you all manner of AWS metrics into NR too).
- hbeaver 13y ago
  +1. I've used Cloudkick (before Rackspace), Copperegg (not too bad either) and New Relic. Server Density is VERY reasonably priced, simple and gets the job of server monitoring done. The custom metrics are key. New Relic for example doesn't support custom metrics. A custom metric example: my Sidekiq queue sizes. When Sidekiq first came out, there was no way to alert/monitor this. It only took a few hours of Python.
  - sdfjkl 13y ago
    New Relic has custom metrics: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-collection http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-collect... What they are lacking in comparison to running your own NMS (e.g. NetXMS or Zabbix) is making custom views (the Dashboard feature in NR is pretty useless).
  - cpsaltis 13y ago
    If you liked Cloudkick I think you should also check out https://mist.io https://mist.io. In fact we started mist.io when Cloudkick was about to close down. We like to think of it as mobile friendly Cloudkick with a twist.

okal 13y ago

Is it no longer open source? We considered using the FOSS version, but ultimately went with a monitoring SaaS.

ajaxaddicted 13y ago
There is still an Open source version :https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone
- citruspi 13y ago
  The difference between the hosted version and the open source version is that the latter can only monitor a single server - you'd need to run a copy of the open source version for each server you have.[0] [0]: http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/ http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/

ajaxaddicted 13y ago

Martin Rusev here, the guy behind Amon. I just want to provide a little bit more information about where the project is headed. First I want to clarify that Amon is not a new project. It has been in development for 2 years now, the SaaS version is in Beta, but I consider the underlying technology pretty stable and mature. My big goal with Amon is to move beyond monitoring into server analytics and recovery. That means - to analyze the data and send meaningful, troubleshoot friendly alerts that show the whole server state, not just "your cpu usage is > 70%". On recovery - The idea behind is to automate simple sysadmin tasks, like cleaning up log files, restarting a process, etc. As an example - if you have an alert: mysql is down for 5 minutes, execute: service mysql start

sdfjkl 13y ago
Sorry, but those are terrible examples. If your processes keep crashing, you should find and fix the underlying problem, or if you're forced to use unstable software, rely on something like upstart or daemontools to keep it running. And if your apache logs regularly fill your disk, add them to logrotate.
- ajaxaddicted 13y ago
  Sorry about the examples, the general idea is that you can execute a command on the server when there are alerts for a specific problem. Upstart and daemontools can't keep your processes running. For this specific task there are tools like Monit, God, Puppet to some extend
  - sdfjkl 13y ago
    Perhaps a better example would be automating a previously manual failover, i.e. if a service becomes unavailable on one machine, start it on the warm standby. Or in EC2, terminate an instance and start a new one.
  - jlogsdon 13y ago
    Upstart can indeed keep your process running. We use it for all of our process monitoring and it works like a charm.

berkay 13y ago

Promising project but the New relic comparison is misguided. New Relic does have server monitoring but it's core strength is in application layer with agents for java, ruby, .net, python, php applications.

gtaylor 13y ago
Indeed. Their application metrics have been incredibly useful for us at Pathwright. It's nice always knowing what views are slow, which comprise the bulk of our CPU time. The SQL time breakdowns are handy to. You can, of course, do all of these things on your own without New Relic, but a small team like us needs to be spending time on other things (like pushing the product forward).
drig 13y ago
I came here to say the same thing. NewRelic is actually pretty bad at saying "your server is down". But, it's incredible at saying "Your landing page is loading slowly because the time it takes to load your data from MySQL is slow. Oh, and here's the offending query." Different things.
- jlogsdon 13y ago
  Adding in the ability to mark when a deploy goes out makes it really easy to see when deploys caused issues historically (and immediately for those not involved with the deploy itself).

tbarbugli 13y ago

New Relic server monitor sucks really bad, they do app monitor really well. Real competitors would be Datadog/Scalyr

gk1 13y ago
Thanks for the shout-out! I'm on the https://www.scalyr.com https://www.scalyr.com team and am here if anyone has questions/feedback/suggestions. It grew out of our own frustration with the available tools, exactly as you express.
- gandalfu 13y ago
  I would be nice if you had screenshots of the UI...
  - gk1 13y ago
    Thanks for that feedback. We're redesigning the homepage now and will include more screenshots. You can check out the live demo in the meantime to see it in action (the app UI will also get a facelift soon): http://goo.gl/BZ5GNd http://goo.gl/BZ5GNd
  - snewman 13y ago
    (Scalyr founder here) Thanks for the feedback. Agreed, we haven't done much to present the product yet. For the last couple of years, we've been focusing on building out the product while keeping our early users happy -- making sure we can walk the walk before we talk the talk. We'll be launching a completely new home page in a month or so that should do a much better job of presenting what we do. In the meantime, if anyone out there is frustrated with the current monitoring offerings, drop us a line (I'm steve@$COMPANY.com). We have a lot to offer, and we'll go the extra mile and beyond on support.
jaryd 13y ago
Don't forget ServerDensity :)
rburhum 13y ago

acallaghan 13y ago

This is really nice, especially the integration with Digital Ocean, really fast setup

vincentkriek 13y ago

I don't like the install script you use. First of all you use sudo hardcoded in the script, it makes me nervous about what you are going to do on my server. I know it's nonsense because a deb can do about anything you want, but it would make me feel better.

ajaxaddicted 13y ago
You can install it manually. It's one small python daemon + 1 config file: apt-get install sysstat python-devel git clone https://github.com/amonapp/amonagent python setup.py install cp amon-agent.conf /etc/amon-agent.conf

dewey 13y ago

FYI, small typo on the front page: "dataand"

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

openmammon 13y ago

it's worth pointing out that new relic does not charge for server monitoring (SmartOS, *Nix, Windows). It's a free product and doesn't matter if you have one server or 100,000 or where they're hosted. https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server

ricardobeat 13y ago

/* GLOBAL */ .column { width: 1280px; Noooooo! 1280px is not a reasonable minimum screen width.

abimaelmartell 13y ago

i made something similar, but multiplatform -> https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor

otterley 13y ago

Your competition is Datadog, not New Relic.

sandstrom 13y ago

A similar product is https://skylight.io https://skylight.io, built by some very formidable people (only a Ruby apps yet though). https://serverdensity.io https://serverdensity.io is another great product! I don't want to take the spotlight away from Amon here, it looks like a good product and the idea of focusing on meaningful analysis is nice (instead of only storing droves of raw stats).

ergo14 13y ago

Lots of people mention New Relic application monitoring - One of the alternatives that I've created is App Enlight - https://appenlight.com https://appenlight.com - giving you application level visibility