

Inspeqtor: easy application infrastructure monitoring - mperham
http://www.mikeperham.com/2014/10/02/introducing-inspeqtor/

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pitr
Seems that, unlike Sidekiq, this starts as a heavily commercial solution, and
it shows. Landing page has a pretty big "Buy Pro" call-to-action button.
Features like support for notifying slack/etc I'd expect to be present in a
free version. Open source feels more of an afterthought. I don't feel
comfortable using even the free version, simply because if the project fails
financially, it is likely to be dropped altogether.

~~~
zrail
The fact that there is a commercial version is proof that mperham wants and
expects the project to continue sustainably.

That said, the open source version provides more than Monit in a better,
easier to deploy package. I think that right there is incentive enough to use
it. Plus, if you want to fork it and add your own specific notification
channels, here's the source:

[https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/blob/891517cc0edc6dda8d...](https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/blob/891517cc0edc6dda8d5faa2f6e0bd8ef03a4f27c/actions.go)

~~~
pitr
I agree that ease of use is the strongest reason to use this.

Just because mperham wants the project to be sustainable doesn't guarantee it.
However, if sidekiq Pro would have failed, Sidekiq would easily survive simply
because of huge open source community. With inspeqtor it's not so clear.

"Route alerts to your team chat room" is listed as a Pro feature. Any PR
implementing it is unlikely to be merge in. And creating a separate fork for a
relatively small feature should not really be an answer to an open-source
project.

~~~
zrail
See mperham's reply here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401372)

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mnutt
Inspeqtor compares itself to monit, god, supervisord, etc, but it looks like
it only handles the monitoring of processes and not stop/start/restart,
correct? It seems like it would be difficult to decouple those when we use
monit for things like "if mem > 200m for 2 cycles then restart".

~~~
mperham
Inspeqtor uses your init system to restart services. It does not manage
arbitrary processes.

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aorth
I just tried to get it to monitor nginx on Ubuntu, but couldn't get it
working. I opened a GitHub issue.

[https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/issues/13](https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/issues/13)

Anyways, it looks simple and I'm looking forward to it maturing. It will be
nice to template and deploy via Ansible. I'm interested in monitoring
PostgreSQL, Tomcat, etc...

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michaelmior
Curious how you plan on managing a pro version of the product when the free
version is open source. Will you just be rejecting pull requests which add
features which are in the pro version? Given that the code is licensed GPL,
this seems to be inviting a fork which will have additional features which
would otherwise be restricted to the pro version.

~~~
mperham
Would I reject PRs? Quite possibly; that seems super passive-aggressive to me.
It would be more polite to open an issue first and discuss the situation.

~~~
michaelmior
I wasn't suggesting the case where someone explicitly does all the work and
opens a PR which implements a feature of the pro version. I was moreso
considering someone who had implemented something that was on the roadmap for
the pro version. In either case, it's reasonable to say you would reject PRs.

I'm just wondering how governance of the project works. I assume you're
already dealing with the same sort of thing with Sidekiq. I just find this
sort of business model interesting since the more common approach seems to be
providing hosting or priority support.

~~~
mperham
Yep, It's my job to communicate a vision for the product: what types of
features are Pro, which are OSS. Right now my rule of thumb is "team" or
collaboration features are Pro, the rest is OSS. Yes, I would close PRs if
they provide more enterprise-focused features that I wanted to sell but not
before chatting with the submitter and seeing if there was a common ground or
some feature subset which could be open sourced.

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sbarre
I get "Unable to locate package inspeqtor" when trying to install on Ubuntu
13.10.

The docs specifically say "12.04 and 14.04" but also "really any Debian system
using Upstart".

Is 13.10 not supported?

~~~
mperham
I only provide LTS binaries since that's what most people run in production.

You can change your distro name to be precise or trusty in the packagecloud
repo in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. It's a Go binary so it doesn't depend on
anything distro-specific.

~~~
sbarre
Great, thanks!

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jameskilton
Couldn't help but notice that the config file syntax is almost exactly like
Monit. Inspeqtor's definitely is more concise and easier to read (and probably
write), was Monit an influence in designing this tool?

~~~
jarod7736
[https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/wiki/Other-
Solutions](https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor/wiki/Other-Solutions)

