News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Best monitoring system? by falcolas on Friday July 22, 2016 @03:48PM (#12146278)
There's always a server. Regardless of how far away you've abstracted it away, there's always a server which should probably be monitored (even if to know when it's about to fail and should have work shunted off it prior to its failure). Icinga and others make it easy to programmatically add and remove servers as they enter and leave your environment.

Even if you don't have access to the server so you can monitor it, you can use the "host" concept as containers for your services: "api.mycorp.com", "tasks.mycorp.com", "backups.mycorp.com" are great starting points.

Re:Ask HN: Best monitoring system? by dozzie on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:24PM (#12146500)
> There's always a server.

Actually, no.

When you monitor state of a cluster (e.g. node count), you don't have a server, you have plenty of servers and a cluster (completely different thing).

When you monitor temperature in your server room, you don't have a server, you have a server room.

When you monitor exchange rate, you don't have a server.

When you monitor a website, you still don't have a server.

And now add all the AWS Lambdas and other serverless rage.

Notion that everything works on a (single!) server was never valid, and today it's even more visible than it was twenty years ago, when Nagios was state of the art.

Re:Ask HN: Best monitoring system? by athenot on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:54PM (#12147040)
True but in practice it doesn't really matter. With sensu, you have offbox checks, and you just pick some internal server (there's always some "misc" server hanging around).

What matters is that the alert about the issue is raised and relayed to the proper notification channels. Since sensu doesn't concern itself with a fancy dashboard, it doesn't really matter if the alert pertains to the host or not.

Any decent monitoring will have customized the alert handling based on what's alerting, so there's some amount of post-processing possible.

Re:Ask HN: Best monitoring system? by dozzie on Saturday July 23, 2016 @08:24AM (#12149278)
> True but in practice it doesn't really matter.

In practice it doesn't matter if you name a file handle "juju" and a database query "peach" in your code.

It's a matter of calling things what they are instead of forcing them into a mismatched data scheme by creating artificial hosts.