
Amon - server monitoring, simplified logging and error tracking for web apps - ajaxaddicted
http://amon.cx
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strags
Why is the trend today towards installations like this?

curl install.amon.cx | bash

I'm looking at you, rvm, npm et al. Yeah, I'd just love you to poop files
randomly into my filesystem, with no tracking, and a completely non-standard
uninstall process (if I'm lucky enough to have one at all).

We evolved package management for a reason - I know it's a pain to have to
make a .deb, a .rpm and a .tar.gz - but is it really that much more work than
making an entirely custom install script?

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StavrosK
This, along with the dependencies (I don't like having to install MongoDB just
for this), is the reason I don't want to try this.

I could probably deal with the installation, although I hate installing all
those daemons and init scripts myself, but installing Mongo just for one
thing, gah. Too bad there isn't an embedded version of Mongo, and my own
goatfish[1] is still far from mature.

[1] <https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/goatfish>

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ashamedlion
I commend you for making something that isn't SaaS -- it seems to be rare to
have one-off payments now, so this makes it more attractive.

Also, it seems that your demo (<http://live.amon.cx:2464/>) is down, which is
a pity as I'd obviously like to try it before installing.

EDIT: And local monitoring is a big plus, too.

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sciurus
Amon was discussed two months [0] and two weeks [1] ago.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313991> [1]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555916>

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JosephRedfern
Amon Plus didn't exist at that time.

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amix
It looks like a great project. Some features I would like to see:

* Alerts via SMS (possibly by integrating Twilio / Tropo).

* API via zeromq instead of HTTP. Async logging via workers. This could become handy if you log lots of things. It would also prevent logging to become the bottleneck of my applications.

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xbryanx
Anyone done a comparison as to why I'd want a simplified tool like this vs. a
more extendable tool like Zabbix or Nagios?

Yes, I realize that those and this probably don't perfectly overlap.

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adparadox
This seems really interesting and I really like that the data would stay
inside my firewall. Any comparisons to New Relic? Looks like ease of
installation would be similar (except for setting up Mongo), but that it
doesn't collect quite the same amount of data (yet).

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wwwhizz
Why would I prefer this over a well-configured monit?
<http://mmonit.com/monit/>

~~~
bradleyland
Amon appears to have a slightly different goal set than Monit. Monit is more
of a "Is this process running and ok?" tool for keeping processes running as
expected. Amon seems a bit more like Munin.

~~~
sovande
Monit is a bit more than that. You can also use Monit to check remote hosts.
Not only can it check http, but ftp, ssh smtp and more. You can use Monit to
test your web-application via the HTTP protocol (404 or 50x) and use regex to
check if certain content exist (or not) on a web-page. Monit is free, open
source and does alerts for free.

~~~
bradleyland
Thanks for the clarification, but my intent wasn't to describe the full
feature set of Monit. All those things you described are still limited to the
scope of "is X running?" type questions. Can Monit graph time series data?

EDIT: My point isn't that Amon is "better" than Monit, only that it's
different. There is some overlap in feature set, but ultimately, the tools
have different goals.

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misterhaywood
Please change the spelling of "straightfrorward" to "straightforward" on your
home page.

~~~
martin_rusev
Fixed. Thank you

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toong
It looks like it isn't possible to add multiple user accounts (in the free
version). I tried browsing to /create_user myself to add a second account, but
I get redirected to the /login page

Is that something that comes with the Plus version ?

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martin_rusev
That's something I've been working on for some time, but it's not ready for
public release. As I see it - Amon Plus will have a fully featured ACL in a
week.

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cicloid
Besides the fuzzy feeling of helping a open source project with comercial
endeavors, how does it compare to services like Server Density, Nagios, Monit,
etc?

~~~
bradleyland
I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon. We used to use a pay-per-month
monitoring service, but I find the setup and maintenance of many services to
be equal to the headache of maintaining something like Munin.

The most obvious difference is that Amon runs on your hardware, so the data
stays with you. The pricing model is fundamentally different than services
like Server Density, New Relic, Scout, etc in that you pay per major version,
rather than per-month.

Amon is currently pre-1.0, so it's hard to compare with a mature service like
Server Density. They're (Amon) no where near feature parity with SD. Then
again, SD will quickly cost you many times the licensing cost of Amon when
you're monitoring multiple servers.

For me, the value judgement will have to wait. With services like Server
Density you are (theoretically) offloading a lot of maintenance overhead to
the SaaS provider. If Amon delivers on their "one line installer" promise,
then it will at least have "effort parity" with many SaaS providers.

I have to wait because they're pre-1.0, so while their software is inexpensive
and easy to use, there is a distinct lack of critical features. If I'm making
the evaluation (whether to roll this in to production) today, I can't live
without alerts, so Amon is out. Based on the way things are looking, I'd say
that Amon has a bright future though. I might buy an early release, just to
get up to speed on it.

Tangent: Where did you see that Amon is open source? I see that I can get
access to the source by licensing it, but I don't see any mention of open
source on the pages I viewed.

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rbanffy
> I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon

Amon Plus can monitor more than one machine.

Also, on the open source thing, it's closer to open-core. The single-server
version is open, but, if you want to monitor more than one box, you'll need
the Plus version, which, despite being distributed with source, is not, AFAIK,
open.

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qcassidy
There's a typo on the Requirements page: <http://amon.cx/plus/requirements/>

Users are instructed to check their python version with `python -v`, but the
correct command is `python -V` (uppercase).

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thehodge
Just bought this, it might not be to everyones taste and it seems to be an
early version but its exactly what I want..

Found a few issues so far and the response time on support has been pretty
quick, I hope development keeps up :)

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cotega
Just wanted to let you know that in Internet Explorer 9 much of your page text
is cut off. It seems to be positioned to the left of the browser so much of
the text (mostly the code) is cut out.

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toong
It looks rather straight forward to add a custom appender for log4j ?

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rplnt
I couldn't find some comparison chart or anything that would tell me what
extra features the pro version has.

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martin_rusev
The normal version can monitor only the server it's installed on. The Plus
version has alerts and you can use it to monitor as many servers and apps as
you like - there are no internal restrictions besides the memory of the VPS
it's installed on. So if you want to monitor 10-15 servers - you will manage
with a 128-256MB VPS, if you have more than that, all you have to do is to
upgrade it to 512MB RAM or more.

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silverlight
So, is that something where the "central"/plus server polls the other servers
that are running the normal Amon logger/monitor for their info then just
displays it in one place?

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martin_rusev
It's the other way around. On the servers you install a 10KB agent that
collects the data and sends it to the central instance

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nodesocket
Looks great. It's a shame your live demo is down though.

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marcc
Any plans to get Solaris/SunOS support in the future?

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martin_rusev
No, only Linux at the moment. I am considering a FreeBSD support and probably
Windows :)

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true_religion
Is application logging done via UDP?

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martin_rusev
It's only HTTP for now, but my plans are to extend it to support different
transport protocols ( 0mq, UDP, TCP)

