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

[John Martinez < >]

A monitoring system that utilizes Ohai data?

Stop it, you're teasing me. :-)

I'm keeping an eye on Assimilation.

On Sep 26, 2012, at 12:55 AM, Brad Knowles 
<
 >
 wrote:

> 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 
> <
 >
> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
>