[HN Gopher] mMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)
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mMon: Stupid simple monitoring (2022)
Author : g0xA52A2A
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-09-24 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tomscii.sig7.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomscii.sig7.se)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| This really speaks to me - rrdtool is criminally underutilized.
| Great work!
|
| I did something different but in a similar vein for one server
| network. We had Seq already deployed for log monitoring so
| instead of setting up a separate network/node/app health
| monitoring interface I configured everything to regularly ping
| seq with a structured log message containing the needed data that
| could be extracted and graphed with seq's limited oob charting
| abilities in the dashboard. Not perfect, but simpler.
| mayli wrote:
| fyi, here is a very similar project.
|
| https://github.com/pommi/CGP
| kburman wrote:
| I really like the idea behind mMon. It reminds me of when
| software was simpler. I remember using a program called
| "Everything" by voidtools. It was small but could search a lot of
| files quickly. Nowadays, some projects use big tools like
| Elasticsearch just to search a few things. Some even use
| PostgreSQL, a big database, for small tasks. I wish more software
| would keep things simple.
| dave8088 wrote:
| "Everything" is a must have for me. It's shocking that Windows
| doesn't come with local search that works.
| sphars wrote:
| Microsoft has added basically the same functionality to Power
| Toys, called Run[0], taking heavy inspiration from
| Everything. But yeah this should be a built-in utility.
|
| [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run
| zacmps wrote:
| Does it read the ntfs journal? Because that's really what
| makes everything, everything.
|
| It makes me wish I used a journaling filesystem on Linux
| too.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I do run Grafana + InfluxDB at home and I agree it's not trivial
| to setup. Grafana in particular makes creating informative, easy
| to read graphs/dashboards a PhD worthy endeavor.
|
| Yet, I run some hobby projects that collect data and this setup
| is absolutely perfect for it. I even challenged myself to use SSL
| for the InfluxDB server (run small CA).
|
| Also, I use slack-based alerting through Grafana, for example if
| a disk would fill up, or something is down.
|
| So it's really about what your needs are.
|
| And often, basic metrics about systems like CPU usage, load or
| network traffic doesn't tell you anything useful or actionable.
| nine_k wrote:
| I like the idea of simplicity and doing exactly what you need.
| And the single executable.
|
| The words "stupid simple" and "C++" together make me scratch my
| head though. C++ itself is not simple, and you have to recompile
| if you need to change something (and sometimes you inevitably
| do), which is slow. I'd likely go with a relatively simple C
| program that embeds the FFI for RRDtool and other stuff, and
| embeds Lua, or, better yet, Janet. Then most of the thing could
| be written in these languages, and would be easy to tweak when
| need be. That would still allow for a single executable + a
| single config file, on top of the logic already embedded. (But
| the author went and built the thing, and I did not, so their
| solution so far outperforms mine.)
| [deleted]
| lost_tourist wrote:
| c++ can be relatively simple if you don't throw in all the
| bells and whistles and stay away from template metaprogramming.
| I use it all the time. Sure compiles can be slow, but with
| proper file partitioning and creating libraries 95% of that can
| be controlled for.
| vsviridov wrote:
| Looks more or less like munin...
| [deleted]
| Borg3 wrote:
| Not bad. I like KISS concepts. I personally run old Cacti
| instance for monitoring here. Not that simple as uMon, but not
| very complicated either. And even wrote cacti_con CLI like graph
| viewer, to see specific port of that fat 100+ ports campus
| switches I had at work :)
| random3 wrote:
| it's 2023. Tracing has been around for 20 years(dtrace, x-trace
| https://cs.brown.edu/~rfonseca/pubs/xtr-nsdi07.pdf).
|
| Very simple logging, if not structured, while not completely
| useless it's not very useful either. except for maybe showing
| some nice charts.
|
| Any serious monitoring tool is useful when it can explain things
| and only tracing gives you causal information.
| ahofmann wrote:
| I like the concept of simple monitoring. Simple means it is
| simple to install, simple to maintain and simple to use. For me,
| this is netdata. Netdata could be much more, but I just install
| it on whatever machine and never think about it again. And when
| something is strange on that machine, I go to
| http://localhost:19999 and look around.
| hadlock wrote:
| Back in 2017 when I had a bunch of physical machines and
| unmanaged VMs we ended up putting netdata on the servers. The
| reason why was because most of the team was used to manually
| logging onto servers and diagnosing the issue manually.
|
| The reason I liked it was because it exposes a standard
| Prometheus endpoint I can scrape and then view using something
| like Grafana. There are only about 20,000 Grafana dashboard
| modules available for netdata but generally you can find one
| that works for you. Having that prometheus endpoint allows you
| to springboard into the cloud and get like-metrics out of your
| cloud stuff as well, with a nice long historical data trail
| from your older/est machines.
| xrd wrote:
| I've been struggling with graphana and netdata looks so much
| better.
|
| Is this a tool where you can boot up the docker app and then
| connect a bunch of servers into a centralized dashboard? Or, is
| it better to think of netdata as a dashboard for a single
| server that permits monitoring of a bunch of processes only on
| that machine?
|
| I'm not sure I understand whether agents can be configured to
| talk to a dashboard, or if you don't need to do that
| configuration because they expect to talk to localhost. I have
| a bunch of VMs running on a bunch of different random hardware
| and want a way to monitor those VMs (and perhaps the hosts as
| well).
| jerrac wrote:
| Not sure I haven't run across it before, but this is the first
| time I've tried using Netdata. Looks like it is very good for
| metrics, at least in the 10 minutes I have spent installing it
| on my local desktop and poking around the ui there.
|
| I'm not seeing anything in it for logs, though. I'm guessing it
| doesn't aggregate or do anything with logs? What do you use for
| log aggregation and analysis?
|
| I'm very interested because I've been getting frustrated with
| the ELK Stack, and the Prometheus/Grafana/Loki stack has never
| worked for me. I'm really close to trying to reinvent the
| wheel...
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(page generated 2023-09-24 23:00 UTC)