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

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 7:14 AM, Booker Bense 
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 wrote:

> Let the fruit fly... But isn't this more or less what SNMP is supposed
> to do? (i.e. Standard Network Monitoring Protocol...)

SNMP could address part of the problem, if there are SNMP agents on all the 
nodes to be monitored, and if the monitoring system itself supports SNMP.  
And of course, SNMP can actually be a pretty heavy weight protocol/service to 
support on either end, although there is much that it can do for you.

But with Chef we already have agents on each node to be monitored, and we 
already have a process of centralizing all the known information about a 
given node, and then putting that information into a central database that 
can be easily accessed and searched.  Is there no way to leverage this 
existing infrastructure for the benefit of the monitoring system?

Contrariwise, is there no way for Chef to be able to leverage the additional 
information that the monitoring system could provide, which can then also be 
centralized to be easily accessed and searched?  Or perhaps even an API to 
access that information live in near real-time?

> I think you have the right concept, though. One of the main reason
> "monitoring sucks" is that they are all vertically integrated. There
> is no way to "mix and match"
> pieces easily. There are no standard protocols for moving from one
> level to the next.

I don't have any answers.  But the discussion brought up certain questions in 
my mind, which I am interested in pursuing.

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