domingo, 29 de junio de 2008

As real time as you can get

The people from Orbitz (the popular travel site) open sourced their real time monitoring application called Graphite.

It uses an specialized database to store the time series data. This allows to quickly retrieve the monitoring information. Other approaches like storing directly to a SQL database are slower because of the engine´s overhead.

Graphite has a very slick and elegant UI to browse the monitored metrics and a CLI for faster administration.

I´m currently using Zabbix at the office, but it needs lots of maintainance from the operations people and has some glitches when it comes to gather the metrics. It also interpolates data when it's inexistent. A critical flaw for a monitoring application. We are planning to replace it with another tool ASAP.

3 comentarios:

Luis García dijo...

Hi, I'm working in the same healthcare company :)

If you have time can you post the tools under analysis and a review of the facts when they are under heavy load (network overhead, human resources overhead, reporting capabilities) o your test results/opinion?

P.S. I'm really interested if there is any Python based tool.

Thanks in advance! I really enjoy your blog.

Diego Naya dijo...

hi Luis, good to see a coworker really interested in IT!
We are analyzing hyperic and manageengine or something like that I think.
We´re using Zabbix 1.1.1, it doesn´t have a good graph engine. Looks nice, but doesn´t show the real data.
There are many cases in which Zabbix couldn´t gather the metric and the graph doesn't show this hole. Instead it tries to get the graph to look smooth and "imagines" new values for the metric.
Also, it´s cumbersome to create a new metric for monitoring, it needs too many values. This version lacks a good templating method. I was told that the new version fixes this.
We´re looking for Java based tools like Hyperic, because we can leverage the development force that we have to make adjustments and modification to the existing code. We lack Python or PHP knowledge.

Thanks for the support!

Luis García dijo...

Hi Diego, I didn't know about Graphite. I'm glad to see that is Python based, so I'll study it.

Maybe you didn't heard about it but http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Main_Page is another (new, but mature) Java based NMS.

My .02 cents.

Thanks again.