
Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard - alex_d
https://monitoror.com
======
reaperducer
Panic used to have an iOS app that did this. It was called Status Board, and
was magnificent.

You could put it on an old iPad on an easel on your desk and watch everything
from RSS feeds to ping statistics. In an office setting, you'd hook the 'Pad
up to a cheap flat screen TV so everyone could see.

Sadly, Panic discontinued it when it decided to go after the video game
market.

~~~
SergeAx
But why do you need an app where webpage is more than enough?

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_jal
Because it cost like $10 and 5 minutes, could be set up by non-web-plumbers,
and was pretty out of the box.

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iamben
Aside: this is one of the biggest lessons of my adult life. Just because I
_could_ make something doesn't mean I _should_ make something. Learning to
value your time is a very underdeveloped skill.

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ampdepolymerase
But...but.. something.. something Stallman...vendor lock-in...closed-platforms
bad...something.

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SergeAx
If it is a sarcasm, then please mind that original comment author got really
humped by this app's vendor when it stopped working. Maybe Stallman got
something right after all?

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reaperducer
It didn't stop working. It just doesn't get updated anymore.

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bigiain
In Stallman thinking though, he doesn't have the freedom to fix or update it
himself.

(I don't think Stallman's ideas are necessarily right for everybody, but I'm
glad he's doing his thing right out in his end of the bell curve to counteract
the opposite end of the software philosophy craziness...)

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quickthrower2
Under Stallmans model the developer works for free, and I guess they need a
second job to pay the rent. Ah but GPL doesn’t mean free as in beer? Oh yes
for practical purposes it does mean exactly that. Outlier business models
excepted of course!

~~~
SergeAx
Actually no. Under Stallman's model it is perfectly okay to demand and earn
payment for your work, but results still would be free, quote, as in "free
speech", not "free beer", unquote. Did you see bounty offers in open source
repos' issues?

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CSDude
I know people like wallboards and monitors but we found them anti-pattern. If
you find yourself looking at a wallboard/dashboard, it should already be an
automated alert.

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wjossey
Strongly disagree.

Understanding your metrics is a key part of so many roles, from devops, to
product teams, to marketers...

Yes, you should be automating alerts whenever possible. Yes, you should be
putting up key metrics in a visible place so everyone can see how the product
is performing.

I can’t tell you how many times I caught an issue because I knew our metrics
backwards and forwards, but it didn’t trip an alert threshold. Not every issue
follows a pattern easily defined in a check, and human brains are incredible
computers capable of helping to fill in that gap.

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geofft
> _I can’t tell you how many times I caught an issue because I knew our
> metrics backwards and forwards, but it didn’t trip an alert threshold._

So how many times was an issue _missed_ because you weren't in the office, or
because you were looking at your own screen and not dashboards at the moment?

Humans are incredibly powerful, but our whole job as SREs is to make things
reliable, repeatable, and scalable. We're doing an industry-wide migration
from elegantly hand-crafted LAMP stacks running SSH to Kubernetes and
infrastructure-as-code, not because you can't fix problems with SSH (you can,
and you can usually fix them faster and better) but because you can't
_scalably_ fix problems with SSH. Similarly, if a human found an issue and
alert didn't trip, I'd count that as a bug/missing feature in the monitoring.

It's valuable while you're still small and working out your monitoring to keep
a human in the loop - but at some point you need to get rid of that single
point of failure. By all means, rely on a human to figure out where your
alerting is lacking (just like you rely on a human to write the
infrastructure-as-code), but you should eventually not rely on human
intervention to actually keep incidents from happening.

~~~
reaperducer
_So how many times was an issue missed because you weren 't in the office, or
because you were looking at your own screen and not dashboards at the moment?_

That's not a problem with dashboards. That's a problem with training and
staffing people.

 _because you can 't scalably fix problems with SSH._

The number of businesses that need to worry about scalability is vanishingly
small compared to the number of businesses that don't. Let's not pretend that
one company's problems are the same as another's.

 _you should eventually not rely on human intervention to actually keep
incidents from happening._

He didn't state that the dashboard was the only way his organization kept tabs
on things. He indicated that it was only one way, and specifically stated that
an alert system also exists.

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tyrust
>That's not a problem with dashboards. That's a problem with training and
staffing people.

Training and staffing people to look at dashboards? I've never heard of this
and it sounds awful.

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reaperducer
"Hey, Mike. On your way to the Keurig, remember to glance at the status panel
on the wall and let us know if something doesn't look right, OK?"

Brutal.

~~~
InvisibleCities
Why should Mike have to remember this? Why should all of your infrastructure
depend on Mike not getting a text from his wife while walking to the fridge
for a La Croix?

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soygul
Care to explain why one would use this over something much more capable like
Grafana? [1]

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

~~~
snug
Grafana needs a backend datastore, and typically prometheus exporters on each
app, etc to get timeseries data that gets into the backend.

This seems to be checking endpoints for data at that specific time, not really
doing any complex calculations or anything of that nature.

~~~
sciurus
How often do you have data that is

1) important enough to display on a dashboard 2) not important enough to
record so you can track it over time

?

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ketzo
Build status immediately jumps to mind.

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kqr
Getting any sort of interesting insight from that surely requires the context
of historical build statuses?

How long will it be down for? When will it be down next? How likely is it that
it goes down next week? Is it just me or has it been down a lot this month?

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cstuder
Strangely the page doesn't say anything about it being Open Source.

It's MIT licenced by the way.

~~~
alex_d
You right, I should add that to the landing page :)

It's in the footer but... who looks at the footer? :p

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CubsFan1060
For a terminal version of this, I really like
[https://wtfutil.com/](https://wtfutil.com/)

Create a config file, and you get something similar.

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djsumdog
I've been looking at different status board tools and the one thing I've
always found missing is dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 tests. It'd be nice to be able to
see that both protocols to a given port are working as expected.

I don't want to write my own, so I'll probably settle on one and try to offer
up a PR for dual-ip stack checks. I'll take a look at this one too.

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sub7
Problem with this is that any half competent team can put something like this
up in an hour or so. Wallboards are for high level stats - like 1 or 2 numbers
the team should focus on.

Maybe the tiles are super smart and can do uptime testing, log monitoring etc
in which case this should be positioned as an uptime tester/log monitor etc

~~~
woutr_be
Speaking from personal experience, our team originally made our own wallboard,
and it was put on a big monitor in our space. Originally all was fine, the
board would stop updating numbers once in a while, but nobody really cared.
Just ssh into our raspberry pi, and restart the services.

Turns out that our scrum masters and product owners looked at this board when
they walked by, now they wanted to see other things as well. So they started
allocating developer time to build these statistics, obviously a job nobody
wanted to do. So we bought an existing solution that had all the data sources
we needed, and let the business manager their stats.

So yeah, I agree anyone could build it themselves, but it rarely sticks to
those 1 or 2 numbers, in which case, it's cheaper to spend a couple of bucks,
than have developers continue to support it.

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thehodge
Reminds me of [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

~~~
djsumdog
Dashing was kinda garbage through. There was no standard/sane way to install
new plugins. I haven't checked out the currently maintained for, but the
original is dead/archived. I made the following for Dashing for tracking
Seattle Transit:

[https://github.com/sumdog/seatransit](https://github.com/sumdog/seatransit)

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blowski
Is this like an open-source Geckoboard?

~~~
alex_d
Kind of, yep :)

But there is no graph/visualization support for now, and Monitoror is more for
IT monitoring right now.

It will evolve to add more and more tile types.

Feel free to create issues if you need specific tile types :)

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BlackLotus89
Could you grab and parse content with this? I'm not really using CI stuff, but
showing events (calendar), grabbing weather data or output from other simple
commands (health checks) could be of use. Didn't find any of that in the
example tiles

~~~
alex_d
Yep, check HTTP-FORMATTED tile :)

You can display content from JSON, YAML or XML available over HTTP

~~~
BlackLotus89
oh didn't see that HTTP-RAW also returns the regex match. Thanks. will give it
a try Any possibility for command outputs thought?

~~~
alex_d
Put the output in a file and expose it with a simple HTTP server :)

I do not think that we will add some command call since it can be heavy and
can potentially add some security concerns.

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grantler
The first UI config example has a PING tile, but PING type seems to be
disabled by default, and I can't find how to enable it in the docs. So maybe a
good thing to make more clear for people wanting to test quickly.

~~~
alex_d
You right, I will change the config example for now.

Check the note in the Ping section here:
[https://monitoror.com/documentation/#ping](https://monitoror.com/documentation/#ping)

I will work on making it more obvious/visible :)

Thank you for your feedback!

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Jeremy1026
It looks like it doesn't actually support changing the port currently, despite
the documentation saying it is possible. I already use port 8080 so kind of
stuck until I can use a different port.

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hsartoris
I got it to run on a different port just fine with the MO_PORT environment
variable, FWIW.

~~~
Jeremy1026
Turns out its just too early in the day. I wasn't saving the variable beyond
setting it. So when I switched terminals it didn't exist. Put it in my bash
profile and all is well.

~~~
alex_d
You can use .env file too, or even put it before the command like that:

MO_PORT=8888 ./monitoror

:)

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gitgud
Nice design! Looks to be targeted at developers, but it could be good for
product managers too. Some tile ideas; Issue counts, PR counts, vanity
metrics... plenty of room for extension :)

~~~
alex_d
There is already GITHUB-COUNT tile type for issue/PR count :)

And yep, we plan to add more and more tile types as user ask them.

Thank you, glad you enjoy the design :D

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kkirsche
Cool item but didn’t scale well for mobile (iOS iPhone XS Plus)

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chrissnell
Neat. I want to add crabby support:

[https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby](https://github.com/chrissnell/crabby)

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dnadler
This is cool, but I'm running into a lot of issues with multiple Jenkins
tiles. The name from one is erroneously propagating to following tiles :/

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bilekas
Nice handy tool, one grip is the scaling with different sizes, the text does
scale, but not the box modules.. Small thing but really nice tool

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captain_qwark
nice

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EToS
Site down :-)

