Re: System monitoring

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2020 at 08:39:03PM +0100, Gábor Boskovits wrote:
> One lightweight soultion on the client would be to provide a
> prometheus exporter, implementing the spec here:
> https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/
> That would need a prometheus server to scrape it, but would be very 
> lightweight.
> Zabbix can be used also, Data can be pushed for example by zabbix_sender:
> https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manpages/zabbix_sender
> Wdyt?

My thinking currently is to write something from scratch. Basically
system monitoring is about handling messages. I want something that is
distributed and does not depend on single servers. Also I want 2-way
communication AND broadcasting :). If we focus on getting messaging
right it will be trivial to tie it to existing engines like Zabbix.

Other requirements are that the base daemon(s) should be written in
guile, but the filters can be in any programming language. To
popularize a system we'll need to support python, for example. With
network interfaces that should not be too hard.

Note that a messaging system is generic. It would allow me to E-mail
or text messages to trigger on meetings in my diary. One of the features
of Google calender I appreciate. The idea is really to be able to
write applications that push messages in on one end, and pick them
up on the other to send out as notifications, or log them in a
database for statistics.

If I have time I'll do some prototyping this month. We should have a
working group during the Guix days!

Pj.