Re: m/monit - centralized monitoring

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

"Mark Ma" <address@hidden> writes:

> This is Mark from Shanghai,China. first of all , i am very excited
> to know that u r in the process of such a monitor system.
>
> actually, i am in this process to ,wish to have more comunication
> with u to talk about that. maybe i could get some good suggestiong
> from you.

Heh, seems that there are many with this idea nowdays :-) I recently
discussed this with Georges Toth also (who is a subcriber to this list
and a monit user). In the monit project we have also discussed this
idea now and then in the past.

#

I sincerely belive that building a centralized monitor application
upon monit as an "agent" is an interesting twist; The thing is, that
most, if not all of the existing centralized monitoring systems out
there, such as HP OpenView, Nagios and Big Brother, just to mention a
few, starts in the "other end". That is; they start with the central
application and add "thin" agents or plugins on an ad-hoc basis (or so
it seems). The result is often a centralized application with a nice
GUI and with lots of statistical data and with lots if fine graphs,
but quite often with an underlying "rotten" architecture. Configuring
and setting up these systems are usually quite complicated, not at
least because of the myriad of plugins.

Staring at the other end with monit is interesting, because monit is
not a "thin" agent but a powerful application in it's own right and
can do lots of useful things on localhost. This way, a centralized
monitoring application need not to be very complicated, instead of
having many thin plugins we can instead have one thin centralized
application which simply is an aggregated view against many monit
instances running on many hosts. Besides if you run monit on more than
one server it will be quite useful to have one and only one
web-application from where you can control the many monit instances.

Oh well, that is the sales pitch :)

> in the other hand, i am not sure if your system is being developed
> by yourself or your company ? if it's yourself's session ,so could i
> join in with you ?

Hmm, I originally planned on doing this for my company but with a very
flexible license, i.e. free for non-commercial use and so on
(something like the Big Brother license) but I'm very ambivalent on
this. I haven't really decided yet, but most likely (90%) I will go
for a GPL license but retain the copyright for my company (also for
any third-party contributions so I at least have the option to do a
dual license).

Still the system will not be completely open-source because I plan to
build it as C servlets on a C application server called zild
(http://zild.no/). This application server is closed source and built
by my company but has a license so that GPL code can use zild. (It's
similar to building a Java application and release the application
under GPL altough the Java platform itself is Sun properitary.)

Anyway, first I have to build and release a first version of the
centralized monit system and if you like the architecture and code you
are very welcome to contribute ideas and code (this invitation is of
course open to anyone and everyone).

If you or others instead will want to start your own project and build
your own centralized monit application based on monit I have nothing
against that of course :) (although forking is seldom a good thing).

> P.S. i cant have a connection with your web site (http://zild.no)
> ,is it working now ?

Yes, it should be up. (The server behind http://zild.no is of course
zild and it's not impossible that the server was down a minute or two
this night but monit is of course running on the server so it goes up
again :)

-- 
Jan-Henrik Haukeland