Re:Ask HN: Best monitoring system?
by mspaulding06 on Friday July 22, 2016 @03:32PM
(#12146152)
Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Briefly I would say that we care about availability more than performance, though both are important. We're running somewhere on the order of 2000 VMs w/ ESX with some bare metal systems running database clusters. We have a separate team that manages the hardware infrastructure and they have their own monitoring and alerting system. I'm mostly concerned about preventing downtime for the application cluster, alerting the right people via the right means (chat, email, pagerduty) when something does go down, and getting some high resolution graphs for analysis.
I still don't know anything much about your systems, but I do know this: find out what your hardware team uses and see if it is right for you, too. (Or find out that they are unhappy with it, and perhaps go in together on a new system.)
Benefits: shared expertise. Common language. Propagation of alerts up from hardware and down from services. Better root cause analysis. If you have a good culture, faster resolution time and better understanding.
This is yet another point where DevOps is not "devs doing ops" but "operations building and deploying with all the tools of modern software development". You need a subject matter expert.
What are you monitoring? Do you care about availability or performance or both? Scale? Do you have services or servers? Do you manage the underlying hardware? Do you need to track which hardware boxes have which VMs or containers?
There are a million questions to answer. One big set of them: what do you dislike about Nagios? Make sure that you don't get those problems with the next one, but also make sure you get something that does what you need as well as what you want.