

Observium: An auto-discovering network monitoring platform - based2
http://www.observium.org/

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dozzie
Another system focused on the wrong thing in monitoring: on alerts and charts.
Those are merely methods of consuming data, not the only ones and not even the
most important ones a decent monitoring system should do.

Sending e-mail or displaying a set of charts or a status table is simple.
Allowing to collect, collate and aggregate the data (metrics and events) in
arbitrary way, also as an afterthought, is what monitoring system should do.
With virtually everything on the market, when a need for any processing not
anticipated by monitoring system author arises, one needs to write much stuff
outside said system.

We need less systems resembling invoicing systems and more systems resembling
general purpose databases.

This is why monitoring _still_ sucks.

~~~
walrus
It's not clear to me what you're looking for. Most monitoring systems log to a
general purpose database, so can't you query against that database when you
want to analyze your data?

I admit I do very little systems/network administration work, so maybe there's
something I'm missing.

~~~
dozzie
Those monitoring systems use some backends, sure. RRD/Whisper, SQL databases,
some even use NoSQLs. But all those are abstractions on inappropriate level
with regard to monitoring. You can't do stream processing on those. You can't
do processing in real time. The only viable operation is to query historic
data; even then, it's hardly doable.

Also, you say I can query against such database. But does the monitoring
system allow me to query that database? I have no documentation for it. Most
of the time I can't easily fill events generated out of that back to the
database. And at last, current so-called "state of the art" monitoring systems
don't facilitate running custom queries, so I would need to write something
totally external just to run the query.

Graylog2 and Riemann go a little in this way, but they stopped way, way too
soon to be an answer to current state of monitoring systems.

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whiskykilo
This is a great free tool, just don't ask for something the developer doesn't
agree with. He and the IRC community supporting it will tear you to shreds.

~~~
llama052
I agree with this, the developer on this is no doubt good at what he does, but
him and the community that supports him is very poisonous. Does not take
criticism well, and is generally hateful to people who say something he
doesn't agree with.

~~~
SpaceInvader
Do you have any examples? I am not teasing here with you. Seriously I'd like
to know what they do since I'm still looking for monitoring solution
(currently testing munin).

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plq
Also check ntop out -- it has similar traffic reports, but no such fancy
multibox support last time I looked.

That's more a job for SNMP clients anyway. Actually, just look at
Nagios/Icinga :) It's a very mature and well-rooted infrastructure monitoring
solution.

