July 2008 Archives

One of the annoyances we find with using Munin is writing plugins. It’s not hard or complicated per se (or any worse than with any of the other monitoring tools). However it often seems confusing and fiddly to our little brains. We’ll admit we aren’t Munin Experts, nor want to be.

The implementation details we do know tend to leak out of our heads over time as, although we use the reports frequently, we typically don’t fiddle with the guts of Munin very often. Which is perhaps a good thing.

Yet from time to time we need to tinker and it is mostly with the plugins.

Kris Buytaert and Tom De Cooman have posted the slides to their OLS 2008 talk:  “Systems Monitoring Shootout”.

For anyone evaluating monitoring solutions, it is a great read. They’ve obviously done a lot of research and if nothing else highlight a huge bunch of issues and topics you would want to consider when selecting a product.

This is a “quick start” to installing munin on a set of Debian / Ubuntu based servers.It covers just enough to get you started … check the munin documentation for additional things you might want to do.

Interesting article from Edd Dumbill :

… the cost of infrastructure has dropped … other costs remain high … System administrators … demand high wages. Commercial software license fees spiral out of control … power is already troubling large companies …Help is at hand … If they don’t yet make massive resource management trivial, they at least make it possible.

In short, if you want to be ahead of the curve, you want to be ahead of the curve with these technologies:

• Distributed revision control systems
• Virtualization
• Configuration management

… because they let you do more with less. Pleasingly, we’re already making heavy use of the first two and had started scratching our heads about the last one.

CNet have a interview with Dave Lilly, GroundWork CEO.

In the same way that Red Hat integrates the Linux kernel and more than 500 open-source components to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GroundWork packages, integrates, and documents more than 80 best-of-breed open-source network and systems management projects.