Please see dash.fiveruns.com for an overview of the Dash service.

Sensor provides a mechanism for “external” monitoring of infrastructure with Dash. Since Dash is usually embedded within an application (i.e. internal), there’s no easy way to monitor things like Apache, memcached, or other pieces. Sensor is designed to be installed on a machine and upload metrics for any infrastructure on that machine. The user just needs to configure which elements they want to monitor.

gem install fiveruns-dash-sensor -s gems.github.com

When you run ‘fiveruns-dash-sensor’ for the first time, it will create a blank configuration for you in ~/.fiveruns-dash-sensor/config.rb. You will need to edit this file with your app token and activate the plugins for your environment. Once done, you should be able to restart ‘fiveruns-dash-sensor’ for a few minutes to verify everything is working as designed. If there are no problems, you can run ‘fiveruns-dash-sensor -d’ to spin off the daemon into the background and forget about it.

fiveruns-dash-sensor --help

Sensor allows you to control OS-specific parameters like log file and PID file location, the user and group to run as, etc. -d will start Sensor as a daemon. To stop it, just kill the associated PID.

Sensor allows you to create your own custom plugins for your own infrastructure. Each plugin should reside in ~/.fiveruns-dash-sensor/<name>.rb and config.rb should have an entry in it like this:

sensor.plugin :<name>, any options here...

Please see the existing plugins for examples of how your code should work.

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