[BlueOnyx:20378] Re: I would love to see this in BO

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Richard,

> What's wrong with Munin? There used to be a package but it which isn't
> maintained, so I do a manual install.
> 
> Is this new application resource hungry? Some of us still run older
> hardware.

Well, I must say I have rarely seen a complex piece of software that
just works without much in the way of quirks. This 'Netdata' is clearly
the exception and it's extremely well done.

Usually when I see that something uses Python or Node.js, then I already
frown and am extremely prejudiced against it. However: The makers of
'Netdata' proved me wrong. They got it in a shape that's just right and
they make the best out of it.

I was also pleasantly surprised about the well done documentation and
the fact that the sources include a specfile for building RPMs. Which
also works out of the box and either builds with Systemd support or (on
older boxes) without it. That wasn't 100% perfect, but 99.5%, which is
still pretty awesome.

So I started building the BlueOnyx integration for it. I got a 5209R
version that works. Then I backported it to 5207R/5208R and just got
that working as well.

For shits and giggles I installed the 5208R version on an Aventurin{e}
6108R. And there 'Netdata' surprised me yet again: Without me having to
tweak any configs it detected all running VPS's and seamlessly provided
statistics for them as well. I wasn't even aware that it had that
capability.

Now in my time I played with a few such monitoring tools. Nagios,
Zenoss, Munin and a few more exotic ones that I've all forgotten about.
Each and any of them was a pain in the ass to install and to configure.
This here? Default install and it's already pretty damn perfect for
something that runs on the same box that it monitors. Which of course
has the drawback that it won't be able to notify you when the server
goes down. So for that purpose it's the wrong tool.

There are also some optional modules available that can be activated. I
looked at a few of them. For example there is a MySQL/MariaDB plugin
that provides pretty neat SQL statistics. I activated it by default on
BlueOnyx, as all it needs is the MySQL root pass, which a
handler/constructor fetches from CODB and writes it into the plugin
config file. Wham, bam, done.

There is also a Dovecot plugin, which has the smell of awesomeness
around it. I couldn't yet get it to work, as Dovecot needs to be
reconfigured for it in a somewhat arcane way that yet eludes me.

There are also plugins for monitoring Apache, PHP-FPM and a whole heap
of other things and the API for writing your own plugins is also pretty
straightforward and simple enough.

All in all: It might not be the one-size-fits-all solution that caters
to everyone’s needs. But it's easy, simple and bombards you with a heap
of information about your server's health that you'd otherwise would
have to chuck out some hard cash or would have to spend hours (if not
days) fiddling with other solutions.

So 'Netdata' gets a solid thumbs up from me for being pretty awesome.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber