Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

A couple of weeks a go Brian Profitt pinged me for a chat about Devops , the result of that chat , his article can now be found on the Zenoss blog, it's titled Datacenter Barometer: Better days arrive when dev meets ops

It's a very nice read with some pointers to places regular readers of my blog should already know ;)
So with lots of leading Open Source infrastructure companies on different levels, such as config management (OpsCode and Reductive Labs) , monitoring (Zenoss) , deployment (openQRM, RPath, and obviously Consultancy companies , the upcoming Devops conferences around the planet promise to be a lot of fun ! ;)

Oh, and apparently there is some more on the story on /.

First of all, I don't come from a Tivoli, OpenView background , I have never touched the commercial network monitoring tools and I`m not a network guy . I'm an infrastructure guy whith a focus on Open Source platforms so I have been using Nagios and more recently Zabbix, Zenoss etc for the better part of the last 2 decades in large to very large environments.
My syslogs go to a central (r)syslog)-ng) server where I frequently abuse grep. So If my experience with RiverMuse is not what it should be , there's work to be done on both sides ;)

So When looking at my Rivermuse setup (in a VirtualBox FC9 setup) my first tought is "Those Rivermuse folks will really need to explain me what their tool is all about .. as to me it's just a fancy colortail integrated with snmp traps."

Hopefully it's not just that and it all becomes clear in a couple of days .. Apart from the FC9 annoyancy there is the frequent Unresponsive script errors.

And those I fear will be the real killer problems for RiverMuse

On the other hand, RiverMuse does good job in displaying the actual events in your network and following up the actions that one ... after a while you'll get a good overview of the actual issues as opposed to all the relevant events

I've dropped RiverMuse into my blade test setup (more on that subject later) and I`ll be keeping a look on what I can learn from it but the dreaded Unresponsive scripts that I know so well from Bamboo really need to be fixed :)

Well time will tell :)

I've updated the slidedeck of my Open Source Virtualization talk, with the 2009 edition as I gave it last week at the UKUUG Spring conference.

Talk is up, both on my page as on SlideShare

Tom also updated our set of Open Source Monitoring Tool Shootout slides .
They are also on SlideShare

I`ll be heading to bed early today as tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get up early to catch my flight to London where
Tom and I will be representing Inuits at the UKUUG 2009 Spring Conference.

Tom will be giving an updated version of our Open Source Monitoring Shootout talk again, I`ll probably be skipping a couple of his slides as right after that Jane Curry will be covering Zenoss in depth and on thursday there will be an OpenNMS talk too.

On Thursday I will be giving another session of my Open Source Virtualization overview talk .. and I also plan on skipping slides and referring to the next speaker, as Matt will be giving an openQRM talk right after me :)

See you there !

In case you haven't noticed them yet ..
MySQL Proxy has a new release and moved it's public repo to Launchpad.

(Still Launchpad isn't open source yet .. a matter of time .. but in the meanwhile Jira and Confluence are sadly gaining adoption in the market)

In the devministration area there is a new Puppet module that automagically populates puppet managed machines in Zenoss , I've seen different people using Puppet to populate their Nagios configs, but adding Zenoss to the list is new.. so when will we see the Zabbix and Hyperic plugins ?

Oh yes.. and then there is Chef

Funny how people call clear and obvious DNS problems a
"mail" problem.

After reviewing the Zenoss book , Packt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing one of their fresh Drupal books, they first suggested a book on Theming but but I opted for the MultiMedia by Aaron Winborn one as Theming really isn't my cup of tee

It took me a while to get the book finished , mostly because of other priorities that kept popping up and being ill for the first week of the year .. but I finally managed

The Drupal Multimedia book , gives a good overview of both Images, Audio and Video and dares to think beyond current MultiMedia. With a zillion possible modules to choose from when starting to build a Drupal site it is often difficult too find the best module for a task, different modules have similar functionalities and features. Aaron saves you the trouble of figuring out which modules are suited best for what task by discussing. For each media type he discusses which module fits best. However , sometimes he opted to discuss a Drupal 5 module that wasn't ported yet to Drupal 6, so you might have to seek for alternatives depending on your Drupal version.

For one of my sites I used the Flickr module that now seems to be outdated, the book pointed me to the Embedded Media Module , so the book was well worth the time spent with it and I`ll have all of my Drupal Hacking friends read it, as it will save them time figuring out which modules to use.

Next up , the Learning Nagios book , but guess I won't be starting to read it before Fosdem .. :)

Santa delivered his goods early at Inuits this year

Sorry John, but we figured the Girls in Your shirt trick would be better than the tags on your Fedora one :)

Bort has another pic, and Dieter suddenly wants to test Zenoss too :)

Matt Reid wants to know what we want in an Open Source MySQL monitoring solution ?

He is working on the second incarnation of Monolith and wants input from the MySQL community.

Now for me the bigger question is if we want an isolated tool that runs stand alone, or a tool which we can integrate it in something we already have.

To me there is a difference between a tool that I want to use to debug my environment, such as Mytop or MySQL Activity Report, in that case I need some tool that quickly installs with little dependencies and little impact.

On the other side I want a tool that is constantly there, that tells me about trends and performance history. But there I don't want an isolated toool, I want something fully integrated where I can correlate different measurements from disk io, memory usage etc , that tool should also tell me about the things that go
wrong.

We did some research earlier this year to figure out the current state of Open Source monitoring tools. Different tools have a different audience.. some go for the network layer, others take the os level and other even try to go deep inside the applications.

Given that knowledge we even had the idea to refocus that research comparing different monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Zenoss, Hyperic and Nagios again but this time with a focus on monitoring MySQL and submit that as an abstract for the upcoming MySQL conference, we didn't .. maybe next time.

There's plenty of frameworks already that will allow you to send alerts on all of the occasions you list, or allow you to graph all the values you want. And yes we want to see those values too.

But do we want yet another tool , yet another URL to browse to or do we want those alerts and graphs integrated in an existing tool such as Zabbix, Zenoss or
Hyperic .. I guess I prefer the integrated approach.

So what happens when you run into a guy wearing a Barcamp ESM cap, an OpenNMS shirt and a Zenoss jacket. You ask him how he got all that stuff .

It seems to be pretty easy ..
Let see if it works for mee too :)

So Tarus and Mark , do you already have my snail mail address ? :)

Oh and Matt, we need some openQRM gear too :)