Monitoring Taxonomy

Monitoring Taxonomy

by Dave Josephsen
Released January 2017
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781491950838

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Book description

Choosing a monitoring tool can be a tedious exercise. Perhaps you need to inspect sFlow traffic. Or measure latency between worker threads and your kafka queue. Which tools are available for your specific task and how do you weigh the options? This free reference guide helps you categorize your problem and then presents a collection of tools that meet your needs.

Using a hierarchy, this ebook lets you quickly filter out tools that don’t apply. Do you want a hosted tool or to manage it onsite? Will it collect measurements or process them? What exactly do you want to monitor? Once you pin down the requirements, Monitoring Taxonomy takes you to the tools that match. This ebook describes 62 open source and commercial tools in eight different categories.

Monitoring cries out for a taxonomy system. While every other engineering discipline relies on rigid classification, "monitoring" has become a catchall for a wide range of tools and activities. This ebook helps overwhelmed operations engineers quickly narrow down the choices.

David Josephsen is an engineer on the Ops team at Librato. He is also a sometimes book-authoring blogger and purveyor of awkward conference talks. He has never lost a game of Calvinball.

Table of contents

  1. 1. Welcome! Read This First
    1. How Does This Report Work?
    2. Let’s Begin
      1. Operations Burden
      2. Pay Model
      3. Activity Model
      4. Focus
      5. Ok, I Think I Know What I’m Looking For, Now What?
      6. How Did You Choose the Tools?
      7. Why Did You Write This?
  2. 2. Monitoring
    1. A Few Types of Monitoring Systems
      1. Centralized Pollers
      2. Passive Collectors
      3. Roll-Up Collectors
      4. Process Emitters/Reporters
      5. Application Performance Monitoring
      6. Real User Monitoring
      7. Exception Tracking
      8. Remote Polling
    2. A Few Things That You Should Know About Monitoring Systems
      1. Think Big, But Use Small Tools
      2. Push versus Pull
      3. Agent versus Agentless
      4. Data Summarization and Storage
      5. Autodiscovery
      6. Data-to-Ink Ratio
  3. 3. traditional.free_open.collectors.data
    1. StatsD: Simple Daemon for Stats Aggregation
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  4. 4. traditional.free_open.collectors.system
    1. CollectD: Everybody’s Favorite Monitoring Agent
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  5. 5. traditional.free_open.monoliths.data
    1. Consul: Not What You Probably Meant by “Monitoring”
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    2. Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK)
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    3. Prometheus: Graphite Reimagined
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  6. 6. traditional.free_open.monoliths.network
    1. SmokePing: Ping, with Graphs
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  7. 7. traditional.free_open.monoliths.system
    1. Check_MK: Making Nagios Easier
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    2. Ganglia: Large Scale, High-Resolution Metrics Collection
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    3. Icinga: Nagios Extended
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    4. Monit: Think Monitoringd
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    5. Munin: Cacti for Servers
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    6. Naemon: The New Nagios
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    7. Nagios: The Venerable, Ubiquitous, Operations-Centric, System Monitoring Monolith
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    8. OMD: Nagios Made Easy(er)
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    9. Sensu: Nagios Reimagined
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    10. Shinken: Py-Nagios
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    11. Xymon: Bigger Big Brother
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    12. Zabbix: A Nagios Replacement for “Enterprise” Businesses
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  8. 8. traditional.free_open.processors.data
    1. Grafana: The “Uber” of Metric Frontends
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    2. Graphite: Everybody’s Favorite OSS Metrics Tool
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
    3. OpenTSDB: Hadoop All the Metrics
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  9. 9. traditional.free_open.processors.network
    1. Cacti: Bringing Joy to NetOps Since 1996
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  10. 10. traditional.free_open.processors.system
    1. Riemann: The Monitoring Leatherman
      1. Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?
      2. Measurement Resolution
      3. Data Storage
      4. Analysis Capabilities
      5. Notification Capabilities
      6. Integration Capabilities
      7. Scaling Model
  11. 11. Still Reading, Eh?

Product information

  • Title: Monitoring Taxonomy
  • Author(s): Dave Josephsen
  • Release date: January 2017
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781491950838