Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

If you are hacking on monitoring solutions, and want to talk to your peers solving the problem
Block the monday and tuesday after fosdem in your calendar !

That's right on february 6 and 7 a bunch of people interrested to fix the problem will be meeting , discussing and hacking stuff together in Antwerp

In short a #monitoringsucks hackathon

Inuits is opening up their offices for everybody who wants to join the effort Please let us (@KrisBuytaert and @patrickdebois) know if you want to join us in Antwerp

Obviously if you can't make it to Antwerp you can join the effort on ##monitoringsucks on Freenode or on Twitter.

The location will be Duboistraat 50 , Antwerp
It is about 10 minutes walk from the Antwerp Central Trainstation
Depending on Traffic Antwerp is about half an hour north of Brussels and there are hotels at walking distance from the venue.

Plenty of parking space is available on the other side of the Park

After all the politics involved in getting a package in a distro, or not it was time for a nice small and clean package of a fresh and promising open source project. Djagios was an easy choice.

I've uploade the rpm and Source RPM to repo.inuits.be and getting the SPEC file in the upstream repo was 10 minutes work.

Next step is to get it into Fedora , and EPEL :)

I found the initial announcement in my Spambox, thats where I send all the mails from GroundWork as unsubscribing from their marketing lists doesn't seem to work ..

Tarus pointed it out.. he already mentionned Marketing, low community imput etc..

Nevertheles I had a look, and my first and last impression was, NagiosForge, no active community, and empty pages on other imvho more relevant Monitoring Projects created by GroundWork employees.

Big John coined the "to pull a GroundWork" phrase aiming at their early products, err logo placements. When we were evaluating differen Open Source monitoring tools for our OLS paper about 18 months ago we looked at the tool and it didn't make the cut .. it failed in all areas where it claimed to be strong, ease of installation , lack of errorhandling during the installation, etc ... some while later another collegue tried again and we ran into similar problems

Yet some people claim it to be a great product.. I'm not a fan yet ...maybe one day they they'll know to convince me .. but for now
When I need Nagios .. I`ll be looking at Djagios , Opsview , Icinga or the real thing.

However, ther's still Hyperic, Zenoss and Zabbix :)

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 :)

Late last year Packt send me yet another book to review
the The Learning Nagios 3 book, a bit more in my field of expertise than the Drupal Multimedia one which I also appreciated,
I already posted I wasn't going to have time to review it before Fosdem but I finally managed.
Having used Nagios on and of for the better part of the decade but not really having touched ground with Nagios 3 yet I had mixed feelings, generally the book gives a good beginner targeted overview of Nagios, with the usual What is, installing and getting started chapters.

Although not having used Nagios 3 yet in production the book didn't really point me out to the different new features which is what I'd expect in a Nagios 3 book.. or I must have overlooked them.

However when you are new to Nagios, I can imagine this is a good read, you'll get a good overview of the different possibilities of Nagios together with hints towards using Passive Checks, using NRPE and even SNMP.

Typo's on the backcover aside I probably would recommend this book to someone who never looked at Nag
ios and wants something in print, but I wouldn't point the experienced Nagios user to it... there are other more in depth works around. But as the title "Learning Nagios" states that wasn't the goal of the book and to get started with Nagios .. it does a good Job !

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

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 .. :)

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.

Ostatic interviews my good friend Matt Rechenburg of openQRM fame

There is one part however where I think we need to elaborate ..
In the Question about the closest alternatives Matt replies "There are some projects like Virtual Iron and Zenoss which are focusing on the same tasks as openQRM. Now I have to disagree about Zenoss being in the same area as openQRM , But Zenoss.. totally different product , not even remotely close to what openQRM does. Zenoss is a competitor to Nagios, HypericHQ , Zabbix etc. You could have an Zenoss plugin in openQRM , just as you can have a Nagios or Hyperic HQ plugin for it . We have presented about these different technologies earlier this year at OLS. And you can still vote for your favorite tool.

Competition for openQRM to me is Enomalism, openNebula, Eucalyptus , with that difference that they don't do Physcial machines.
All of the Enomalsm, Nimbus , openNebula, OS Circular etc projects are focussing on managing Virtual Machines deploying them over the network . with that difference that they have or support an API to talk to and they are al rebranding to the overhyped Cloud terminology. They are all focussing on just a subset of wat openQRM is doing and that's where openQRM has the edge.. OpenQRM does more than just one type of Virtualization and it does more than just virtual machines. Because of the fact that it supports more than 1 Virtualization platform it also comes with a complementary P2V and V2V migration toolkit. Apart from that it integrates (Virtual) Machine Management with other tools and gives you a dashboard to work from .

The 451 group has some more insights about the growth of openQRM since Qlusters set it free , seems like both the downloads and the traffic for at SF.net since the changes are up. Obviously the community likes the new openQRM approach, and so do I ;)

So Tom and I just finished our Systems Monitoring Shootout talk here at OLS 2008.

The talk was fairly wel attended and gained a lot of hallway afterchatter. (We ran almost out of time so we took the Q&A in the Hallway so the next speaker could start his talk).

I've placed the presentation online already for your viewing pleasure ..

The Vote for your favourite monitoring tool is still open so please vote !

While here in Ottawa we got news that our talk was also selected for the upcoming Nagios conference in Germany in September.. so Tom will be presenting it there again.
Most probably with even more findings !

Anyway .. back to the conference now .. trying to catch up with my other writings :)