This document discusses various open source monitoring tools that can be used to monitor heterogeneous servers and prevent failures. It introduces tools like Ganglia for monitoring, Nagios for alerts, Munin for simple monitoring, Collectd to collect data from servers, and RRD as a backend database standard. It encourages selecting tools based on architecture and use case, and provides examples of companies like Etsy that use these tools to achieve real-time monitoring and prevent failures. The overall message is that using these free and reliable open source monitoring tools can help system administrators prevent server failures and save the world.

1. Open Source
Monitoring Tools
Save the server, Save the world
Jeff Smith
jeffreyksmithjr@gmail.com
@theperipatetic1

2. Problem
Many heterogeneous servers
Can't let them fail
Servers can't talk or fix themselves...yet

3. WWBD?

4. What would Barbie do?

5. "Systems administration is hard.
Let's go shopping!"

6. Why Open Source?
● Free!
○ Free as in beer
○ Free as in speech
● Classic reasons*
○ Market Share
○ Reliability
○ Performance
○ Scalability
○ Security
○ Total Cost of Ownership
* from David A. Wheeler

7. Monitoring Master:
Ganglia
Good enough for Wikipedia

8. Alert and Oriented:
Nagios
(Complex) alerts
(Complex) administration

9. Somebird to watch over me:
Munin
Comprehensible
Plug-and-play

10. A daemon in the sack:
Collectd
Do one thing, and do it well.

11. A back end that doesn't get bigger:
RRD
● Used nearly everywhere
● Few competitors historically
● De facto standard

12. Just here for the scenery:
Graphing Tools
● RRDTool used to power (nearly) everything
● Gnuplot
● Innovation on the horizon
○ Graphite, Flot, etc.

13. Spoiled for choice:
Selection Criteria
● All about architecture
● What is YOUR use case?
● Beware the splitters

14. Don't stop me now:
Learning More
● RTFM
● RRTFM
● Books?
○ Ganglia: soon to be 1
○ Nagios: 5
○ Munin: 1...in German!
○ Collectd: 0

15. Leading Lights
● Tobi Oetiker
● Universities
○ Berkeley
● Large websites
○ Etsy
○ StumbleUpon

16. Whoopty do, what does it all mean?
Servers fail
Be a PreCop
Real-time bug detection
"Measure Anything, Measure Everything"
-Etsy

17. Be a hero
Save the server, Save the world

18. Cyberstalk Me
Jeff Smith
jeffreyksmithjr@gmail.com
@theperipatetic1