Open Source Monitoring and Me

Over the last year I've been building up servers, services and applications at work. We've rolled out new hardware, OSes and applications on top of them pretty much non-stop since I began here. Keeping tabs on the uptime of these resources has been a task that fell by the wayside. On any given day we have a number of fires to put out and an ever-present list of features to implement in the new systems.

For a while we've gotten away with this Wild Wild West of Application Uptime. As our application base has grown though, we're increasingly finding ourselves unaware of problems before our clients notify us. And that's never a fun phone call to take.

Typically, I'm a free software zealot (as in root beer-covered speech). But I understand that people need to make money, and that some of the best open source products have commercial benefactors. But anytime someone mentions paying gobs of money for proprietary software, my gag reflex kicks in. So it was when my boss started talking about buying some monitoring software.

I quickly related to him that I had attended a BoF session at this year's pycon where I let the Zenoss sales team pitch me their product. I recalled being pretty impressed by the fact that every doubt I had about the product was cast away one at a time as they answered question after question from those that were there. So I'm exaggerating a little, but I was impressed.

Installation was not easy. Several attempts at a full build install left me in an unusable state, until I found a new install option, oh yeah baby, it's all about the .deb packages. Seriously, my procrastination since PyCon paid off in spades here as Zenoss has been busy the last few months. Ubuntu's debian base works its usual pain-free magic here as a simple apt-get install zenoss-stack brings up the base of a monitoring solution. The only hiccup were some weird errors due to my VM running out of memory (bad zenoss, 512MB ought to be enough for any dedicated server). No problem, we'll just up it and move on with life.