[nycbug-talk] Statistical Monitoring

[Steven Kreuzer]

On Nov 4, 2008, at 11:28 AM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> What do all of you use for monitoring now-n-days?  In the past I've  
> used a
> combination of Nagios and Cacti, but I've setup Nagios on a new  
> setup, and
> while investigating Cacti (via SNMP) I also began investigating  
> Ganglia.
>
> What do all of you prefer - push methods or pull methods for  
> statistics
> gathering and graphing?  It seems using Cacti with SNMP would work  
> nicely,
> but also using Ganglia to push the data to a centralized gmond (which
> I've also done in the past) works well, too.

I used Ganglia at a previous job and for the most part found it to be  
a nice way to
quickly poll several thousand hosts.

In addition to having it report on things like cpu and memory usage,  
it was integrated
into one of our internally developed applications which allowed us to  
retrieve statistics
specific to that application in a more efficient manner.

Previously all the statistics were being exported by a tiny built in  
web server and then
having a script make http get requests to each server. It did not  
scale too well.

My only complaint with ganglia is that after running it for a while,  
it would stop
responding to requests and require the service to be restarted.

Steven Kreuzer
http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer