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If you just want quick & cheap server monitoring -aaS, there's http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/, with a pretty straightforward Python

by 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.
lobster_johnson 13y ago
I tried Server Density and was really depressed by my experience. During my first couple of hours I encountered a ton of bugs, all of which I reported to SD. Some of them were UI issues — I would edit a chart's settings or an alert, and a minute later my changes had been reverted to the original one. Some of them were monitoring issues, with alerts showing up 45 minutes after the service went down (I was testing with a non-production setup), or not at all, or showing false positives and/or wrong values. And a good deal of SD was not well designed, eg. no monitoring templating. Also sad to see that plugins cost money; SD comes with very little functionality built in, so you have to rely on plugins. In general, the whole system seemed incredibly brittle. Not something I would trust a production system to. They have been running SD since 2009, but it feels like an alpha version; not a good sign. (That said, SD's response was very forthcoming.) I switched to Scout [1], which is not as visually pretty, but works and seems very sturdy. No bugs found so far. Integrates very well with Puppet, easy plugin development in languages like Ruby. Oh, and plugins are free. [1] http://scoutapp.com/ http://scoutapp.com/

by sdfjkl 13y ago

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.

lobster_johnson 13y ago

I tried Server Density and was really depressed by my experience. During my first couple of hours I encountered a ton of bugs, all of which I reported to SD. Some of them were UI issues — I would edit a chart's settings or an alert, and a minute later my changes had been reverted to the original one. Some of them were monitoring issues, with alerts showing up 45 minutes after the service went down (I was testing with a non-production setup), or not at all, or showing false positives and/or wrong values. And a good deal of SD was not well designed, eg. no monitoring templating. Also sad to see that plugins cost money; SD comes with very little functionality built in, so you have to rely on plugins. In general, the whole system seemed incredibly brittle. Not something I would trust a production system to. They have been running SD since 2009, but it feels like an alpha version; not a good sign. (That said, SD's response was very forthcoming.) I switched to Scout [1], which is not as visually pretty, but works and seems very sturdy. No bugs found so far. Integrates very well with Puppet, easy plugin development in languages like Ruby. Oh, and plugins are free. [1] http://scoutapp.com/ http://scoutapp.com/