
Why We Built Marvel - ayanb
http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/building-marvel/
======
RyanZAG
There's a bunch of free tools for monitoring ES also. While they aren't as
pretty, they certainly get the job done.

[http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/c...](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/community/current/health.html)

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simplechris
I've been really impressed with how easy it was to set up and instantly
identify bottlenecks within our infrastructure. Sure, other plugins have
offered similar statistics (and some with a nice UI too) but to provide all of
this insight out-of-the-box and in a single tool is an amazing addition to
Elasticsearch, and in my opinion will help boost even more widespread
adoption.

If anyone is interested, I wrote about my initial reactions to Marvel here:
[http://chrissimpson.co.uk/elasticsearch-marvel-monitor-
and-m...](http://chrissimpson.co.uk/elasticsearch-marvel-monitor-and-manage-
your-cluster.html)

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justinsb
Looks _really_ great: one of the prettiest dashboards I've seen, combining
logs & metrics. However, it would be a lot more interesting if it was open
source; because then it would get forked and applied for monitoring other
systems. It would also demonstrate that ElasticSearch is a good solution for
storing monitoring data, and the potential audience for ES would be much
greater.

As it stands, it looks like another company trying to monetize open-source by
selling a pretty dashboard, because that is what "enterprise" cares about.
That to me feels very short-term.

~~~
wobbleblob
What's wrong with a company trying to monetize their own open source product?
Do you feel they should live off donations? Or get a second job to fund their
work on Elasticsearch?

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justinsb
Nothing is wrong with them trying, I just want to see them succeed in doing
so. I was finding fault in their strategy for monetization, not in their
desire to do so.

I believe customers pay for support, not for the GUI that makes support
easier.

For me, the big picture is to boost ES adoption, so that the 1% of customers
that pay is a bigger pie. Trying to squeeze another few hundred dollars a
month out of the existing customer pool doesn't feel like a winning strategy.

But of course I"m just armchair quarter-backing: hopefully I'm wrong and ES
will gain adoption because this GUI funds other developments.

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LambdaAlmighty
Gentlemen, gentlemen.

ElasticSearch sits on top of MASSIVE investment money (closed series B). Your
worries about developers needing a "second job" are not substantiated. This is
not an evening hobby project of a starving developer.

And there's the rub: investors want their money back.

The pace and aggression with which ES pushes its products and services must
only increase from now on. Better get used to it.

~~~
simplechris
Fair points, but I think it's important to highlight the distinction between
Elasticsearch BV, (the company - who will try to continue to offer commercial
services and support to grow their business - fair enough) and the
Elasticsearch project, which is the open source project.

As a company, Elasticsearch BV will reinvest back into the Elasticsearch
project, which will increase the adoption and value of their commercial
services. Both exist independently, but the success of either improves the
other.

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dmourati
I tried to install this last night and failed. I'm still on ES 0.90.5. I had
previously tried to upgrade to v1.0rc and failed. In the meantime, I'm using
ElasticHQ which is great.

[http://www.elastichq.org/](http://www.elastichq.org/)

Some feedback for the team:

This release of Marvel would have made more sense after 1.0.

The authentication and authorization of the entire system still needs work.
I've got a proxy apache+LDAP in front now but it's clunky and difficult to
understand/modify with plugins for example.

You should integrate Marvel and other plugins into your apt/yum repos.

Finally, keep up the great work! Truly revolutionary stuff and great building
blocks for all of us out there working in this space. Thanks.

~~~
kimchy
Marvel works with 0.90.9 and above, which I highly suggest you upgrade from
0.90.5 if you are on it in any case.

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kbar13
The interface looks a lot like grafana:

[https://github.com/torkelo/grafana](https://github.com/torkelo/grafana)

Is it based on or inspired by grafana?

~~~
kimchy
grafana is a fork of Kibana. Kibana is a visualization tool of data in
Elasticsearch, and Marvel is based on Kibana.

So no, its the other way around.

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mattdeboard
I don't use ES but this looks awesome. What do I use is Solr, and New Relic
for monitoring. It would be great if Marvel integrated with New Relic.

