

Happy Sysadmin Day! Cloudkick Developer plan: all features, 1 server, SMS alerts - cloudkick
http://cloudkick.com/t/sysadmindayhn

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brandon
Super impressed. In 20 minutes I was able to hook up my personal Linode with a
level of monitoring that probably would have taken a few hours to pull off
manually.

I don't think I would have considered using the paid service before, but this
free account offers a compelling experience. I bet it'll pay off in
conversions.

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AngryParsley
Sounds like you set up the Cloudkick agent. If you really want to take
advantage of the agent, try out some custom plugins
(<https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Custom_Plugins>). We've cleaned up a few
that we use internally and made them available at
<http://github.com/cloudkick/agent-plugins>

~~~
brandon
Indeed. I'm a Debian user, so it only took a minute to get the agent running
which I appreciated a _lot_.

It seems like the only piece missing is graphing and alerting on bandwidth
usage with the agent. Linode provides a nice set of hypervisor-level views of
IO/CPU/Bandwidth but they're really only useful historically and from a
billing perspective. On second thought, this sounds like an awesome way to get
familiar with the plugin interface ;)

~~~
AngryParsley
There's a bandwidth check type. Click on the monitor tab, then click on new
monitor, then select Bandwidth in the check type drop-down.

We don't support alerting on bandwidth usage yet, but that check will alert if
the interface is down.

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AngryParsley
Disclaimer: I work at Cloudkick

In case there's any ambiguity, Cloudkick isn't giving a cloud server instance
to everyone for free. The developer plan lets you monitor and manage one
server for free. It has all the other features of paid accounts though: SMS
alerts, custom plugins for monitoring, etc. I use it for my one EC2 instance
that acts as my personal web server/IRC bouncer/VPN server/whatever.

~~~
uggedal
I tried to add a cell number for getting SMS alerts. The "save and test
notification" prompted me with "Notification sent!", but several minutes later
I've yet to see a message.

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cloudkick
Also, if you're interested in a paid plan, we're offering 15% savings for the
next 48 hours!

Use the promo code: "cksysadmin" or visit
<https://www.cloudkick.com/pricing/cksysadmin>

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michaelbuckbee
We use CloudKick to monitor some of our servers and it is just completely
awesome. It's way easier than monitoring a bunch of servers with htop and much
quick than trying to roll your own solution.

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dotBen
I'm really excited to try this... <s>sadly I'm getting time-out issues when
trying to set up monitoring with my Linode API key but I'm guessing you guys
might be under a lot of load with this promo?</s>

It's working now. It looks as though it didn't want to add a node until I
authenticated my email address even though it took me directly to an "add
node" flow directly upon signup.

I also can see a lot of conversions from this.

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yannk
As others have pointed out, I have timeout errors with linode.

One thing of concern for me is that giving away my linode API key is not
something I really would like to do. I don't use this key for anything at the
moment, but my understanding is that it gives to the holder the right to
delete my linode. not WANT. Arguably it's more a linode problem that it is
cloudkick's

~~~
cloudkick
Your API credentials are the keys to the kingdom, so you're rightly cautious
about giving them out.

However, we can proudly say that with nearly one million servers having passed
through Cloudkick without being inadvertently rebooted, terminated, or
otherwise... statistically, it's probably more likely that you'll accidentally
terminate it yourself manually than that something untoward will happen to it
if you're managing it with us. Our entire business is based on making server
management better, easier, and safer for you and we do everything we can to
make our service infallible.

In fact, some of the initial inspiration for our dashboard was that existing
tools made it too easy to accidentally kill the wrong machines. Some providers
give nodes names that aren't exactly user-friendly, and without some basic
sorting and labeling tools, eventually almost anyone would make a mistake. So,
we added coloring, sorting, and renaming to mitigate that kind of user error.

Also, on the subject of security, we just added the ability to require multi-
factor authentication to log in to your Cloudkick account. You can choose to
require a YubiKey, one-time SMS code, or one-time email code to access your
dashboard. We did a brief write-up on our blog if you're interested in
learning more: cloudkick.com/blog

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yannk
Thanks for the answer.

I forgot to test one thing before terminating my trial (nice job by the way,
the complexity is just a bit overwhelming initially): Is it possible to remove
the API key once the initial setup is done as long as the agents are running
on the monitored machines?

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cloudkick
It is possible, but you'll need to add the "name" option to the agent config
in /etc/cloudkick.conf.

Here's the documentation: <https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Cloudkick.conf>

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thegyppo
Would love to see a slightly smaller plan for 2-3 servers or a little more
flexibility for those of us that don't have 6 servers...yet! :D

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mark_l_watson
I agree, there are many of us who for our own use just have 2 or 3 servers.
For customers/companies, the rates seem reasonable.

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awad
I signed up and am looking forward to trying it out for a new project I'm
working on. Just a weird site note: for some reason, my browser is locking up
for a few seconds every time I click on a link in my dashboard. My CPU usage
is spiking. Can anyone much smarter than I hazard a guess as to what's going
on?

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cloudkick
Hey there. If you want to jump into #cloudkick on freenode, or jump into our
support chat (it's the link down at the bottom-left of your screen) and
provide a few more details, we will try to figure out what's happening.

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joe_bleau
Hmm. I just tried to sign up and get a 403: "CSRF verification failed. Request
aborted."

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pquerna
Hi, I took a quick look, and it looks like you were using Opera -- We are
spining up people to double check in opera right now, but I'd suggest re-
trying in Firefox or Chrome

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joe_bleau
Yep, I'm one of those.

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pquerna
We confirmed it works in Opera 10 -- I got scary faces made at from the
webdevs me when I suggested supporting Opera 9!

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joe_bleau
Strange. I'm on 10.50 and it's still 403. Updated to Opera 10.60: 403.

Edit: nevermind, I got it to work. Must have had referrers turned off. I
rarely see that cause a failure, so it wasn't on my normal checklist.

Sorry for the noise!

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rk655321
I was going to sign up but their terms and conditions -- especially number
seven is a full stop for me three as well. They should really let you know.

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mark_l_watson
To be clear: if they terminate your use of Cloudkick, _your_ _servers_ keep
running - they just aren't being monitored anymore.

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mark_l_watson
Really nice! I just signed up, and set up my sandbox EC2 quickly, and I find
the feature set meets my needs. The free price to monitor my EC2 is great, and
will likely pay off for Cloudkick when I recommend them to my customers (I
always like it when customers use the same tools I use for my stuff - makes
life easier.)

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daveungerer
It there no way to quickly add a default set of monitors? Because it seems
quite tedious to add them one at a time just to get an idea of how the service
works.

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phsr
It's not available for chunkhost.com. I'd love to try it out on chunkhost

~~~
tomazmuraus
It looks like they just offer normal virtual servers with root access.

By looking at the supported OS images, you shouldn't have problems installing
Cloudkick agent
([https://support.cloudkick.com/Setting_up_Cloudkick_with_Phys...](https://support.cloudkick.com/Setting_up_Cloudkick_with_Physical_Servers))
on any of them.

Actually, the installation should be pretty simple, because we already offer
pre-built packages for all of the systems currently supported at chunkhost -
<https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Installation>.

If you do encounter a problem, feel free to stop at #cloudkick @ FreeNode and
we will look into it.

