This document summarizes and compares several open source monitoring tools: Nagios, Graphite, StatsD, Logstash, and Sensu. Nagios is introduced as a commonly used tool that some love and some find frustrating. Graphite is described as a tool for storing and graphing time-series data. StatsD aggregates counters and timers and sends them to backend services like Graphite. Logstash is an tool for managing logs and events that can input, filter, and output data. Sensu is a monitoring router that connects check scripts to handler scripts to alert or process monitoring data. Examples are given for each tool and what types of metrics to collect.

1. The State of Open
Source Monitoring
Tools
Michael Richardson (@m_richo)
Energized Work

2. What tools are we currently using to
monitor and troubleshoot our systems?

3. What tools are we currently using to
monitor and troubleshoot our systems?
•
•
•
•
Nagios
ssh + grep <something_bad> /some/random/log/file.log
tail –f /some/random/log/file.log
Others?

4. Nagios

5. Nagios – The lovers

6. Nagios – The lovers

7. Nagios – The lovers

8. Nagios – The lovers

9. Nagios Love-meter
0
10

10. Nagios Love-meter
Where are you on the Scale?
0
10

11. Nagios Love-meter
Where are you on the Scale?
0
Nagios shits
me to tears
10
Sign me up to
Nagios World
Conference 2013!!!!

12. Alternatives ?

13. Alternatives ?
Yep, there’s lots

14. Alternatives ?
Yep, there’s lots
some are better and
some are worse

15. Today let’s check out
• Graphite
• Statsd
• Logstash
• Sensu

16. Graphite

17. Graphite
•
•
•
•
•
Metric storage
Complex graph creation
http://graphite.wikidot.com
Apache 2.0 license
Send time-series data that you are interested in graphing

18. Graphite
Components
1. Web
2. Whisper
3. Carbon

19. Graphite
•
Everything stored in graphite has a path with
components delimited by dots. Eg
servers.HOSTNAME.METRIC
applications.APPNAME.METRIC
servers.database01.memfree
applications.trading.loginattempts

20. Graphite
•
•
No need to pre-define metric end-points
Determine granularity of data upfront.
/opt/graphite/conf/storage-schemas.conf
[stats]
pattern = ^stats.*
retentions = 10:2160,60:10080,600:262974
[catchall]
priority = 0
pattern = ^.*
retentions = 30:86400,300:525600

21. Graphite
What should I graph/trend?
1. Application Profiling Data
2. Operational Profiling Data
3. Regression Testing (releases)
Why should I Graph/trend?
1. Trends can tell you when something is about to break.
2. …instead of hearing from your customers that it’s broken
3. Data can tell you when something is already broken but
you don’t yet know it (regression).
Source: Jason Dixon (@obfuscurity)

22. Graphite
Demo
Image source - http://joemiller.me/2011/11/05/correlating-puppet-changes-to-events-in-your-infrastructure/

23. StatsD

24. StatsD
•
•
•
•
Measure Anything, Measure Everything
Created and released by Etsy
Aggregate counters and timers
http://github.com/etsy/statsd

25. StatsD
• Written in node.js
• ~400 lines of javascript
• Listens to statistics (counters & timers),
and sends aggregates to backend
services (like graphite).
• simple

26. StatsD
Don’t like Javascript or Node.js??

27. StatsD
Don’t like Javascript or Node.js??
Google “statsd alternatives”…..

28. StatsD
Don’t like Javascript or Node.js??
Google “statsd alternatives”…..
20+ rewrites/clones for you including..
Ruby, python, scala, python+twisted,
erlang, clojure, C, groovy

29. StatsD
Concepts
• Buckets (a name that translates to graphite end-point)
• Values
• Flush (default 10 seconds)
Counter metrics
successfullogins:1|c|@0.1
Timing metrics
apitimer:320|ms

30. StatsD
Counter examples
• Successful customer login attempts
• Failed customer login attempts
• Register a new customer
• Hit 3rd party API

31. StatsD
Timer examples
• How fast is our function blah()
• How fast is a database query
• How fast is our 3rd party API service
• How fast is our internet access
• How fast are our page response times.

32. StatsD
demo

33. LogStash

34. LogStash
•
•
•
•
•
Tool for managing Events and logs
http://logstash.net
https://github.com/logstash/logstash
Apache 2.0 license
Created by Jordan Sissel
(@jordansissel)

35. LogStash
• Written in ruby.
• Built with jruby and ships as a jar file.

36. LogStash
LogStash agent is an Event pipeline with 3
parts.
1. Inputs
2. Filters
3. Outputs

37. LogStash
1. Inputs – generate events
1. Filters – modify them
1. Outputs – ship them somewhere

38. LogStash
Inputs include :
amqp, drupal_dblog, eventlog, exec, file,
ganglia, gelf, gemfire, generator, heroku,
irc, log4j, lumberjack, pipe, redis, relp, sqs,
stdin, stomp, syslog, tcp, twitter, udp, xmpp,
zenoss, zeromq

39. LogStash
Filters include :
alter, anonymize, checksum, csv, date, dns,
environment, gelfify, geoip, grep, grok,
grokdiscovery, json, kv, metrics, multiline,
mutate, noop, split, syslog_pri, urldecode,
xml, zeromq

40. LogStash
Outputs include :
amqp, boundary, circonus, cloudwatch,
datadog, elasticsearch, elasticsearch_http,
elasticsearch_river, email, exec, file,
ganglia, gelf, gemfire, graphite, graphtastic,
http, internal, irc, juggernaut, librato, loggly,
lumberjack, metriccatcher, mongodb,
nagios, nagios_nsca, null, opentsdb,
pagerduty, pipe, redis, riak, riemann, sns,
sqs, statsd, stdout, stomp, syslog, tcp,
websocket, xmpp, zabbix, zeromq

41. LogStash
Typical setup

42. LogStash
Shipper alternatives?

43. LogStash
Shipper alternatives?
• Syslog (rsyslog, syslog-ng,)
• Lumberjack
https://github.com/jordansissel/lumberjack
• Beaver
https://github.com/josegonzalez/beaver
• Woodchuck
https://github.com/danryan/woodchuck

44. LogStash
Kibana
• Web interface for viewing logstash
records stored in elastic search
• http://kibana.org/
• http://github.com/rashidkpc/Kibana
• Search for records
• Stream records (near realtime)
• Create RSS feeds based on search
results
• Score, trend data

45. LogStash
Kibana – search data
Image source - http://kibana.org/

46. LogStash
Kibana – trend data
Image source - http://kibana.org/

47. LogStash
Demo
(Syslog & Apache access logs)

48. LogStash
TIP – Go buy the Logstash Book –
http://logstashbook.com/
James Turnbull (@kartar)
It’s a great introduction to how to use
Logstash.

50. Sensu
•
•
•
•
•
https://github.com/sensu/sensu
Creator – Sean Porter (@portertech)
Ruby, RabbitMQ, Redis
<1200 lines of code
Omnibus installation packages

51. Sensu
Components
• Sensu-server
• Sensu-client
• Sensu-api
• Sensu-dashboard

52. Sensu
• Message oriented architecture
(messages are JSON objects)
• Described as a monitoring router
• Connects “check” scripts on Sensu
Clients to “handler” scripts on Sensu
Servers

53. Sensu
Checks can
• Determine if a service like apache up
and running? (check exit code)
• Collect metrics like page views or
database cache usage.

54. Sensu
Output of checks are router to 1 or more
handlers who determine what to do.

55. Sensu
Output of checks are router to 1 or more
handlers who determine what to do.
• Send alerts via email, pagerduty, IRC,
twitter, basecamp, xmpp, hipchat,
campfire, etc, etc

56. Sensu
Output of checks are router to 1 or more
handlers who determine what to do.
• Send alerts via email, pagerduty, IRC,
twitter, basecamp, xmpp, hipchat,
campfire, etc, etc
• Feed metrics to backend services like
graphite, librato, opentsdb, etc, etc

57. Sensu
demo

58. Questions??

59. Thank you