Feature request: notifications about amon HOT 6 CLOSED

This is the part I am really excited about :)
First, let's clarify - Amon will soon have 2 different versions, the open source version - which is this project and another paid version for people who need more features. Like this one :)

So the paid version will have something I call - active smart notifications.
Instead of mindlessly sending you mails for everything, you will be able to set a bunch of rules that make sense for your server/application.

For example:
Rule: apache memory > 100MB
Send mail
Action: invoke.rc.d apache2 restart
or
Rule: sda1 free space < 1000MB
Send mail
Action: rm -rf /var/log/apache/access.log-from-rotation

from amon.

First, let's clarify - Amon will soon have 2 different versions, the open source version - which is this project and another paid version for people who need more features. Like this one :)

Hmm. I'm not at all sure that a monitoring system without notifications is worth anything at all. Let's examine two scenarios, all of which I fill:

A) New open-source project seeks open-source monitoring

I'm starting out on a new open-source project and am looking, either for budgetary constraints or ideological reasons, to use an open-source monitoring setup. Nagios and a host of others already exist--even if they're a pain a look awful--and do two things:

• collect data
• send notifications about said data meeting some conditions

Syslog already does the first point: the real secret-sauce is in the second. I'll not choose to use Amon open-source version because, without the notification, it is merely an elaborated syslog.

B) Established company seeks to move monitoring in-house

Again, the same considerations exist as above: a monitoring system must

• collect data and
• provide notifications on said data

Nagios, et all etc, but a paid service--like CloudKick or Splunk--was used to reduce time to market: the ops team was busy elsewhere and plunking down $99 a month was cheaper and faster than slumming with Nagios. One eventually grows weary of a one-size fits all solution and looks to move essential services in-house, to adapt them, give back to the OS community and save what became $450/month by hiding that cost in a salary. Amon being GPL, how will notifications be available in a paid version but not in the open-source release? I can imagine that:

• Amon OSE will have hooks for a for-fee service, hooks which might be adapted to one's own notification engine.
• Amon non-OSE will run 'in the cloud' and skirt the GPL restrictions on the notification engine.

In either scenario something has to run 'in the cloud', which puts it in direct competition with more mature services that I am already using and interested in migrating from. That is, while Amon looks nice and is easy to setup, it's not a viable product.

C) New company wish to setup a logging/monitoring service

Here I think Amon fairs poorly against both Nagios et al and the paid for 'cloud' services: no notifications from the OSE version and there's some risk in choosing an upstart in a crowded field when there is insufficient advantage over competitors. Hell, simply knowing that I could at a later date move to a full in-house OSE version of Amon would likely get me to choose 'cloud' Amon over paid services, whereas choosing to use Cloudkick over nagios feels like a deal with the devil.

It's a fine looking project and I wish you all the best. If I could have notifications in the OSE it'd fill a niche for me; it is, I know, difficult to make a living by giving things away for free.

from amon.

Wow, thank you so much for the comment.

There is one difference between Nagios, Cloudkick ( Zenoss as well ) and Amon - I am not going and I have absolutely no intentions in going after the enterprise market. I want to provide an alternative for small startups that have 1-2-4 servers, small companies that doesn't have a system administrator and the developers have to carry this burden. And of course the price will be according to that. Amon will cost 19.95$ before 1.0 and that's all you pay, no monthly fees, nothing. One price, use however you like.

And I think that you are completely right about the notifications, it should have something at least, so I will think what can I include in the OSE version.

from amon.

Wow, thank you so much for the comment.

No problem.

There is one difference between Nagios, Cloudkick ( Zenoss as well ) and Amon - I am not going and I have absolutely no intentions in going after the enterprise market. I want to provide an alternative for small startups that have 1-2-4 servers, small companies that doesn't have a system administrator and the developers have to carry this burden. And of course the price will be according to that. Amon will cost 19.95$ before 1.0 and that's all you pay, no monthly fees, nothing. One price, use however you like.

Hmm. I've been known to run Ops for small to medium sized startups--one to four developers, a similar number of servers--so that's my implicit perspective. When money is especially dear, all infrastructure components must:

• have a healthy return on investment (keeping in mind that a completely free solution still costs in man-hours)
• be dependable
• as a corollary of the last point, be automatable and ignorable

Now, for even small companies--say one man shows in which I do everything--I'm primarily going to be concerned about Amon on the second point: I can't imagine how you would

• remain solvent
• with sufficient uptime and
• provide well enough for yourself to advance the product.

Even my smallest projects generate a few gigabytes of data a month for me to crunch and I'd want to push probably a gigabyte to you per day for any moderately trafficked website. Now, I'm not aware of your data retention plan, but I like to keep a few months worth of data in a round-robin fashion. Let's say I cull some of the data each day, so at the end of the two months I'm storing an even 10 GB, data that I want to query and see graphs about. Let's just say that's the cap: I'll never consume more than 10GB, okay? Assuming a pretty generous $0.15 per gigabyte of data storage I'll cost you $1.50 per month or, to put it another way, I'll cost you more than I paid you in 13 months.

If I want my product to be popular--and I do--then Amon is a worrying choice: it will not scale as I do. I'll have to economize and I'll have to fuss over what data I send to your paid solution.

That's a violation of all three of my concerns. I think that CloudKick is woefully overpriced, but I don't have to worry that it'll go out of business on me. Likewise, Nagios is expensive to setup but, mostly, fire and forget thereafter. I'd love to have a product that hit between Nagios--meaning it's open-source and I could setup my own rig if I had a mind to--and CloudKick--which I can just pump data into and never have to worry about it dropping offline--a product I could pay $20/month for (plus storage costs) and ignore it until such a time that the storage cost expenditure or bandwidth bill or whatever grew so large that it would be time for me to move the setup in-house.

from amon.

Sorry, there was some misunderstanding here - the paid solution is you pay and you install it on your own machines and scale as you like :)

Just for reference, here is my business plan so far :
Amon OSE - as it is + notiifications, only for localhost
Amon - multiple servers, multiple apps, one license, one price and it's agent:central server thing, but you are installing both on your machines

it will be something like curl.install.amon.cx/license_key/
and curl install.amon.cx/agent/license_key

And finally - I am working on a small addon shop - for apache, nginx, mysql, postgres - these will provide New Relic kind of touch and you will be able to check/test/record the real world performance of your applications . The addons will be priced somewhere between 6.99$ and 9.99$ and
when you pay for them once it's curl install.amon.cx/mysql/license_key

So the only thing that will be in the cloud really is the installation :)

from amon.

Ah, indeed. I like that. You might, of course, want to update your copy some. :)

from amon.