Over the course of the series I’ve talked about monitoring effectiveness , monitoring environments , metrics , the tools people use to monitor and the demographics of the survey. In this last post I am providing the anonymized source data that I based my analysis on. It’s in CSV form and comes directly from Survey Monkey. The only data I have removed is the IP address of the respondents to make it…
In the last posts I talked about monitoring environments , metrics , the tools people used in monitoring and the demographics of the survey. In this post I am going to look at the questions around the effectiveness of monitoring, how people handle alerting and the use of configuration management software. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were…
In the last posts I talked about the tools people used in monitoring , the demographics , and what environments people monitor . In this post I am going to look at the questions around collecting metrics and what those metrics are used for by respondents. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete. This post will cover the questions: 7. Do you…
In the last posts I’ve talked about the the tools people used in monitoring and the demographics of the survey. In this post I am going to look at the question around what parts of people’s environments are monitored. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete. This post will cover the question: 6. What parts of your environment do you monitor?…
In this series I am looking at the results of my recent monitoring survey and specifically the monitoring tools being used by respondents. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete. This post will cover the question: 5. What tools do you use for monitoring? (Choose all that apply) Every respondent was required to answer question five. Last year…
In an earlier post I talked about the 2015 edition of the monitoring survey and the background to it. In this post, the first of several posts analyzing the results, I am going to look at the demographics of the responses. The survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete. This post will cover the questions: Which of the following best describes your IT job role? How big is your…
As many of you are aware I recently ran a small Monitoring survey. I ran a similar survey last year and decided to see if the results had changed. Assuming interest continues I’ll run it again next year too. Again, the intent of the survey was to understand the state of maturity across some key areas of monitoring. I was specifically interested in what sort of monitoring people were doing, some…
TL;DR - The Art of Monitoring has a sample chapter I’m writing a new book on monitoring rather illustriously called The Art of Monitoring . I’ve just released a sample chapter from the book. The chapter focuses on installing, learning and using Riemann for monitoring. The book is progressing well and I hope to have it out at the end of the year. If you’re interested in receiving updates and…
TL;DR - Please take the 2015 Monitoring Survey Last year I ran a monitoring survey , whose data I also reviewed as a series of posts on this blog and presented in several talks. I was interested in running the survey because I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a significant change in the maturity of the monitoring landscape. I’ve decided to make the survey a yearly event and am coinciding the…
Forthcoming book - The Art of Monitoring One of the classic problems of monitoring alerts is that they are often very cryptic. Coupled with the challenge of alert fatigue 1 this makes working out what to do next when you receive an alert quite tricky. Additionally, alerts often happen when we’re not at the top of our game: a 4am on a Sunday morning alert is not likely to foster an exemplary…
One of my pet hates is having to maintain configuration inside monitoring tools. Not only large pieces like host definitions but smaller pieces like service and component definitions. Using a configuration management tool makes this much easier but it still generally requires some convergence to update your monitoring configuration when a host is added or removed or a service changes. An example…
TL;DR - This is not a comprehensive guide to Clojure , but it is enough to get you started with Riemann . This is also an excerpt from my forthcoming book - The Art of Monitoring . It'll also be available in the Riemann documentation at some point too. Riemann is configured using a Clojure-based configuration file. This means your configuration file is actually processed as a Clojure program. So…
I’ve recently started alerting on expired events from Riemann via email. The default email alert looks something like this: It contains some useful information but it is pretty basic: the subject is the name of the alerted service and the body contains a basic printout of the event’s fields. I decided I’d like to build some alternative emails and so I went digging into the mailer plug-in code to…
I recently needed to export all the articles from a GitHub wiki. I had thought I’d need to scrape it but I discovered that each GitHub wiki is in fact a Git repo. If you need a copy of the content you can just clone it via Git. $ git clone git@github.com:username/repo_name.wiki.git That’s neat and I hope it’s useful to someone else. Treat GitHub Wiki like a repository was originally published by…
TL;DR - I am writing a book about monitoring and you can sign up for updates here . Let’s begin with an origin story. Once upon a time(-series) there was a sysadmin. She managed infrastructure that lived in a data center. Every time a new host was added to that environment she installed some software and setup some checks. Every now and again one of those servers would break and a check would…
One of the challenges of getting to know Riemann is that its configuration is in Clojure. Your Riemann configuration is actually a Clojure program that executes when Riemann is running. For some folks this is a very new language and sometimes a new approach. To help with this process I’m keen on collecting a bunch of sample Riemann configurations from people who have already “been there and done…
In my first post I introduced you to Riemann and my second post discussed Riemann for fault detection . In those posts we’ve discovered that Riemann aggregates events from distributed hosts and services. One of the cool outcomes of this aggregation is the ability to generate metrics from the events. We can then use a tool like Graphite to store the metric data and render graphs from it. In this…
I’ve been thinking a lot about monitoring maturity . Based on some research I did last year and a number of conversations with people in the industry I’ve documented a simple monitoring maturity model. I present it largely because some folks might be interested rather than as any sweeping revelation. The three level maturity model reflects the various stages of monitoring evolution I’ve seen…
In the last post I introduced you to Riemann . I mentioned streams in that post and how they are at the heart of Riemann’s power. However I only provided a vague teaser of streams and left you having to go fish for yourself. In this post I’m going to build on our example Riemann configuration. I’ll show you how to do simple service management with streams and introduce you to Riemann’s state…
If only I had the theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough - Bernard Riemann For the last year I’ve been using nights and weekends to look to a variety of monitoring and logging tools. For reasons . I’ve spent a lot of hours playing with Nagios again (some years ago I wrote a book about it ) as well as looking at tools like Sensu and Heka . One of the tools I am reviewing and am quite…