[chef] CM/Chef API access for monitoring systems?

[Brad Knowles < >]

Folks,

At the Bay Area Chef Users Group meeting tonight (see 
<http://www.meetup.com/The-Bay-Area-Chef-User-Group/events/82878822/>), I got 
the pleasure of listening to Daniel talk about the new "whyrun" mode and some 
of the other new features of Chef.  I'm always pleasantly surprised by the 
speakers that BAChef manages to bring in.


We also had a question from the audience as to why we can't ever get a good 
monitoring system that is able to work hand-in-hand with a good CM system 
(like Chef), and so we're stuck with things like trying to write or implement 
Nagios NRPE modules and the monitoring system ends up being the heaviest 
thing we do -- it takes the most work to manage, it generates the most crap 
noise, it takes the longest to converge, and is generally very ... 
unsatisfactory.

Of course, there are other monitoring solutions out there, depending on how 
much information you want to monitor about each node, and how you want to go 
about gathering and using that information.  But Zenoss doesn't seem to be 
measurably better in this particular area, nor does any other monitoring 
system that I am personally acquainted with.


Now, I happen to know that Alan Robertson has been working on a new project 
called the Assimilation Monitoring Project (see <http://assimmon.org/>), and 
I believe that the architecture of AssimMon will scale better than any other 
monitoring system I know of.  Of course, it is very much a work-in-progress, 
and there is still a lot left to do.  But I think Alan is pretty well suited 
to the task, based on his work on the Linux-HA project and based on what I've 
seen of the talk he gave at LinuxCon 2012 about AssimMon (we're hoping to get 
the edited video for that posted very soon).

However, it occurs to me that one of the things that a good monitoring system 
could make use of would be a relatively simple standardized API to be able to 
access things like Ohai discovered data regarding the nodes, as well as 
Chef-managed data regarding the nodes.  There's no sense re-inventing the 
wheels that Chef has already invented, if you can relatively easily make use 
of what is already there.


So, now I start to wonder what such a standardized API might look like, and 
what kinds of information might be useful for a monitoring system to be able 
to access regarding the nodes it should be monitoring?

Which leads me to the idea of posting such a question on this list, to see if 
anyone else had any ideas or thoughts?


Thanks!

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>