

Linode Longview - jedicoffee
https://blog.linode.com/2013/09/05/linode-longview/

======
threeseed
Why is HN still tolerating this disgraceful excuse for a company ? Hacked
twice. On both occasions deliberately withheld key information from their
customers. Which as VPS providers is pretty much the most important thing they
can do (i.e. be transparent about security issues).

It's hilarious for me to watch the hyperbole about the CIA, NSA, Snowden etc
and yet tolerate a more direct and clear abuse of privacy and security.

~~~
rimantas
Did you hack it yourself if you are so well informed? If not, what are your
information sources? Rumours? I couldn't care less about thing you believe and
they have no influence to my opinion about Linode. BTW, they did not abuse
neither my privacy, nor my security.

~~~
blah32497
It was all over HN a while back. They were incredibly cryptic and slow to
respond after they got hacked. They tried to downplay what happened instead of
saying it straight. So clients didn't know what measures they needed to take
to protect themselves. The community response afterwards was that basically
these people can't be trusted at all.

Even their wiki mentions that they got hacked
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode)

------
jonheller
Unbelievable how much complaining there is this thread. This is a great, free
addition to their service and is very well done for getting a quick overview
of a server.

~~~
rbanffy
To be fair, this is half a solution for getting a quick overview of a server.
You still need thew collector/visualizer, which, at least now, is proprietary.

You could, conceivably, make your own collector/visualizer, but that seems to
be the hard part here.

~~~
Kudos
I think you misunderstand it's actually a free add-on limited to 30 minutes of
retention at 5 minute intervals. The paid version has 1 minute intervals with
unlimited retention.

Edit: the parent has since stealth edited their comment.

------
andrewaylett
Munin seems like it would be a much better choice for most people -- both the
server and the client are Free and it stores a year of data. What it doesn't
do is allow you to drill down into old data -- it's only got static day, week,
month and year graphs. You can graph pretty much anything, though.

[http://munin-monitoring.org/](http://munin-monitoring.org/)

~~~
jonknee
Why is it a much better choice for most people? It's tricky to configure and
requires you to manage another server. For people who want to go through that
and have the flexibility offered Munin is great (I use it), but for "most
people" who just want a high level look at their stuff Longview seems ideal.
There is almost no setup and no management. I put it on a couple servers
yesterday and it seems slick.

------
bluesmoon
Warning. If you have a high traffic server, Longview will eat up all your CPU.
It has a function that iterates through all open file handles to find out
which ones are network sockets in an O(n^2) loop. This loop never completed on
my system. I had to kill the process and eventually disabled Longview.

~~~
mlacitation
Have you tried a recent version? This commit should have made things much
better:

[https://github.com/linode/longview/commit/dc48b6ddce04dc7155...](https://github.com/linode/longview/commit/dc48b6ddce04dc7155b317336ef860a280f52764)

------
jevinskie
> Basic Longview is completely FREE and includes 5-minute data resolution and
> 30 minutes of data retention.

Surely Linode isn't giving you an evaluation that handles 6 data points. What
does the basic version actually do?

~~~
BCM43
7 actually. And I think so.

[https://library.linode.com/assets/1406-lv_network.png](https://library.linode.com/assets/1406-lv_network.png)

~~~
marcosdumay
Nice way to evaluate something called "longview".

------
nivla
Just had it installed. It is much better than the standard log metrics they
offer. However what is bothering me is that the whole installation is through
a short URL.

curl -s [https://lv.linode.com/aBcD](https://lv.linode.com/aBcD) | sudo bash

Where aBcD is randomly generated. If you visit
[https://lv.linode.com/aBcD](https://lv.linode.com/aBcD), it contains not just
the script to execute but also your API Key. How safe is it to expose your API
Key?

Since the randomly generated value is only 4 characters long, it shouldn't be
hard to find other people's API keys by brute forcing it.

~~~
GvS
When I go to [https://lv.linode.com/aBcD](https://lv.linode.com/aBcD) it
shows:

    
    
      #!/bin/bash
      echo "Invalid Installer Session"
      echo "Please see the Longview details page to start a new session"
      echo "OR if you would like to install Longview manually please see:"
      echo "http://library.linode.com/longview"

~~~
csomar
I don't think the OP is going to put his short url which has his API keys.

------
nwh
Calling it open source is a bit dirty. The data slurping part is, but their
stuff on the other end is completely proprietary and paid.

~~~
pionar
Notice it says the _agent_ is open source, not the whole thing.

~~~
nwh
Bit like advertising half a free car as "free car".

~~~
ZeroMinx
I disagree.

The software running on your machines is open source. It can be reviewed.
Quite important for people not wishing to run closed source software on their
machines.

~~~
nwh
They're a company that you're probably trusting most of your keys and data to.
Trust in them must be absolute anyway.

~~~
ZeroMinx
Different things.

Yea, if you're hosting with them, trusting them is handy.

This Longview agent can be run anywhere though, doesn't have to be on a Linode
machine. Not entirely sure why you'd want this setup, but still..

------
pixard
Seriously Linode? 30 minutes of data retention on the free version? You could
have at least set it to 7 or even 3 days. 30 minutes is not nearly enough.

~~~
jonknee
Imagine all the money they will lose by not giving more stuff away to people
who don't want to pay them anything for it.

------
thehodge
I always get a bit annoyed with paid versions that give you less things that
the free version, the free version gives you 10 servers but if you take the
first step of the paid, you only get 3.. (I know there is a difference in
retention)

------
davidy123
I hope you all know about Logstash & Kibana, which seems like a superset of
this. There is even a node.js version of logstash.

~~~
luciferuk
I know right...need we go on. OK <cough> graylog2 :)

~~~
obituary_latte
<sneeze> snorby :)

------
sandfox
only 30 mins of data retention... even AWS gives you 2 weeks at 5min
resolution for free (albeit only stuff the hypervisor can measure because they
don't run an agent, so no RAM etc).

~~~
kbar13
Linode provides basic hypervisor-level usage graphs by default in the Linode
Manager. it's one of the more prominent features.

------
eyepulp
I'm a fairly happy Linode customer and have been for 3 or so years. (Yes,
security/transparency could be better). We've got a nodebalancer and ~10
nodes. What longview lacks for me is a mechanism for notification & alerts.
The value of monitoring is only half the equation. Step two is something that
either has sensible defaults or easily adjusted settings and notification when
limits are exceeded or below acceptable limits. I don't want to have to
constantly watch longview to see a problem.

Anyone know if it provides this, or if there are better monitoring tools or
services that do?

~~~
robszumski
Rackspace Cloud Monitoring has an API driven way to manage notifications
(people) and notification plans (groups of people) that can be flexibly tied
to specific checks and alarms. It runs very similarly to this, with an open-
source agent running on the host, or remote checks that try to connect from
the outside.

[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/monitoring/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/monitoring/)

------
jtolj
I've been beta testing Longview for a while. It's been kind of nice to have. I
most liked the at-a-glance visibility of whether there were any system package
updates available.

The pricing structure is disappointing. I would have rather seen per system
pricing ($3-5 mo/server is roughly what it would be worth to me). I have 4-5
nodes running. I'll likely never have 10 so $40/mo doesn't seem like a very
good value proposition.

------
nkvoll
Without custom metrics (for example, via StatsD), I'm unable to use Longview
to collect these "Meaningful metrics". It may provide me with an overview of
what a system does as a whole, but I definitely need custom events from my
applications to show up in the same graphs for it to be useful.

~~~
marianoguerra
you could adapt the agent and use something like Event Fabric: [http://event-
fabric.com/](http://event-fabric.com/) and add the other information you need
with different agents.

disclaimer: I'm the founder of Event Fabric

------
gosukiwi
I really want to try this, munin is awesome but I find quite hard to configure
and some stats hard to understand, longview's design seems much more friendly.

------
seany
I find it really hard to care much about news from linode given their history
with security and transparency...

------
phormat
Doesnt' seem to work with my cloud image of saucy: Unable to locate package
linode-longview.

------
jtokoph
I wonder if they considered a partnership with New Relic instead of building
this in-house.

------
fsniper
Graphit with better UI?

~~~
misframer
I'm not sure if I see any features worth paying for.

