

Amon.cx: New Server monitoring beta to compare with New Relic - marquis
https://amon.cx/#beta

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ajaxaddicted
Martin Rusev here, the guy behind Amon. I just want to provide a little bit
more information about where the project is headed. First I want to clarify
that Amon is not a new project. It has been in development for 2 years now,
the SaaS version is in Beta, but I consider the underlying technology pretty
stable and mature. My big goal with Amon is to move beyond monitoring into
server analytics and recovery. That means - to analyze the data and send
meaningful, troubleshoot friendly alerts that show the whole server state, not
just "your cpu usage is > 70%". On recovery - The idea behind is to automate
simple sysadmin tasks, like cleaning up log files, restarting a process, etc.
As an example - if you have an alert: mysql is down for 5 minutes, execute:
service mysql start

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sdfjkl
Sorry, but those are terrible examples. If your processes keep crashing, you
should find and fix the underlying problem, or if you're forced to use
unstable software, rely on something like upstart or daemontools to keep it
running. And if your apache logs regularly fill your disk, add them to
logrotate.

~~~
ajaxaddicted
Sorry about the examples, the general idea is that you can execute a command
on the server when there are alerts for a specific problem. Upstart and
daemontools can't keep your processes running. For this specific task there
are tools like Monit, God, Puppet to some extend

~~~
sdfjkl
Perhaps a better example would be automating a previously manual failover,
i.e. if a service becomes unavailable on one machine, start it on the warm
standby. Or in EC2, terminate an instance and start a new one.

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berkay
Promising project but the New relic comparison is misguided. New Relic does
have server monitoring but it's core strength is in application layer with
agents for java, ruby, .net, python, php applications.

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drig
I came here to say the same thing. NewRelic is actually pretty bad at saying
"your server is down". But, it's incredible at saying "Your landing page is
loading slowly because the time it takes to load your data from MySQL is slow.
Oh, and here's the offending query." Different things.

~~~
jlogsdon
Adding in the ability to mark when a deploy goes out makes it really easy to
see when deploys caused issues historically (and immediately for those not
involved with the deploy itself).

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rschmitty
There is also [http://www.graphdat.com/](http://www.graphdat.com/) for another
light weight server monitoring (first server free!)

While both are great, I think New Relics value is in all the application
details you can get for "free"

~~~
gk1
There's also Scalyr ([https://www.scalyr.com](https://www.scalyr.com)), built
by two ex-Google devops engineers. (Full disclosure, I work for them.)

There's no shortage of options out there. What we've heard from people is that
while New Relic is powerful, it has a steeper learning curve and can be
cumbersome for small/medium companies. I suspect that's why many alternatives
are popping up.

~~~
rschmitty
Also their pricing.. The company I work for has no problem paying but my side
projects where I'd like the same level of visiblity.. I just can't justify the
cost

Thanks for the link on Scalyr, will definitely check it out. Btw, it wouldnt
hurt to throw up some pictures on your site :)

~~~
gk1
Thanks for the feedback! :) Many others seem to agree with you about the
graphics, so we're definitely working that into our re-design, which is in
progress now. I hope you try us out anyway!

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aioprisan
This is equivalent to the server monitoring of the New Relic platform, but not
the application monitoring side of things, which I think is what most people
pay New Relic for.

~~~
sdfjkl
If you just want quick & cheap server monitoring -aaS, there's
[http://www.serverdensity.com/](http://www.serverdensity.com/), with a pretty
straightforward Python plugin system for your custom metrics.

None of this compares to what New Relic gets you with their deep code
introspection. Server monitoring is just an additional gimmick you get with
it, mostly because its nice to have all your metrics in one place when you
hunt down a problem (there's a CloudWatch forwarder than fetches you all
manner of AWS metrics into NR too).

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hbeaver
+1. I've used Cloudkick (before Rackspace), Copperegg (not too bad either) and
New Relic. Server Density is VERY reasonably priced, simple and gets the job
of server monitoring done. The custom metrics are key. New Relic for example
doesn't support custom metrics. A custom metric example: my Sidekiq queue
sizes. When Sidekiq first came out, there was no way to alert/monitor this. It
only took a few hours of Python.

~~~
sdfjkl
New Relic has custom metrics: [http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-
metric-collect...](http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/features/custom-metric-
collection)

What they are lacking in comparison to running your own NMS (e.g. NetXMS or
Zabbix) is making custom views (the Dashboard feature in NR is pretty
useless).

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tbarbugli
New Relic server monitor sucks really bad, they do app monitor really well.
Real competitors would be Datadog/Scalyr

~~~
gk1
Thanks for the shout-out! I'm on the
[https://www.scalyr.com](https://www.scalyr.com) team and am here if anyone
has questions/feedback/suggestions. It grew out of our own frustration with
the available tools, exactly as you express.

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gandalfu
I would be nice if you had screenshots of the UI...

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snewman
(Scalyr founder here) Thanks for the feedback. Agreed, we haven't done much to
present the product yet. For the last couple of years, we've been focusing on
building out the product while keeping our early users happy -- making sure we
can walk the walk before we talk the talk. We'll be launching a completely new
home page in a month or so that should do a much better job of presenting what
we do. In the meantime, if anyone out there is frustrated with the current
monitoring offerings, drop us a line (I'm steve@$COMPANY.com). We have a lot
to offer, and we'll go the extra mile and beyond on support.

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okal
Is it no longer open source? We considered using the FOSS version, but
ultimately went with a monitoring SaaS.

~~~
ajaxaddicted
There is still an Open source version
:[https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone](https://github.com/martinrusev/amonone)

~~~
citruspi
The difference between the hosted version and the open source version is that
the latter can only monitor a single server - you'd need to run a copy of the
open source version for each server you have.[0]

[0]:
[http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/](http://martinrusev.github.io/amonone/)

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acallaghan
This is really nice, especially the integration with Digital Ocean, really
fast setup

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sandstrom
A similar product is [https://skylight.io](https://skylight.io), built by some
very formidable people (only a Ruby apps yet though).

[https://serverdensity.io](https://serverdensity.io) is another great product!

I don't want to take the spotlight away from Amon here, it looks like a good
product and the idea of focusing on meaningful analysis is nice (instead of
only storing droves of raw stats).

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vincentkriek
I don't like the install script you use. First of all you use sudo hardcoded
in the script, it makes me nervous about what you are going to do on my
server. I know it's nonsense because a deb can do about anything you want, but
it would make me feel better.

~~~
ajaxaddicted
You can install it manually. It's one small python daemon + 1 config file:

    
    
       apt-get install sysstat python-devel
       git clone https://github.com/amonapp/amonagent
       python setup.py install 
       cp amon-agent.conf /etc/amon-agent.conf

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thibaut_barrere
If you compare with New Relic, will Amon show the bottlenecks and slow
transactions in Ruby code?

~~~
glynjackson
Nothing in their road map:
[http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general](http://amon.uservoice.com/forums/189097-general)

They state its free in the BETA period so I'll give it a try. Pricing looks
good too. Monitoring memory on an EC2 instance is tricky at times.

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ergo14
Lots of people mention New Relic application monitoring - One of the
alternatives that I've created is App Enlight -
[https://appenlight.com](https://appenlight.com) \- giving you application
level visibility

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abimaelmartell
i made something similar, but multiplatform ->
[https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor](https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor)

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ricardobeat

        /* GLOBAL */
        .column {
          width: 1280px;
    

Noooooo! 1280px is not a reasonable minimum screen width.

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openmammon
it's worth pointing out that new relic does not charge for server monitoring
(SmartOS, *Nix, Windows). It's a free product and doesn't matter if you have
one server or 100,000 or where they're hosted.

[https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server](https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server)

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dewey
FYI, small typo on the front page: "dataand"

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otterley
Your competition is Datadog, not New Relic.

