Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix
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For those of you using SaltStack, are you using it for monitoring systems as well (using beacons, etc)? Or are you still using a dedicated monitoring tool such as Zabbix for monitoring your systems?
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I'm using Zabbix for monitoring.
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I feel like you would have to do a fair bit of reinventing the wheel if you were going to try to do monitoring with salt. As far as I know, it's designed just to trigger automation based on simple events. Collecting metrics and triggering alerts based on predefined characteristics would be a whole area of monitoring you would miss out on.
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At the moment, you'd still want something like Zabbix for monitoring if you want real time alerts. Sodium will be getting there, but isn't there yet. So you'll need to retain that old infrastructure for the time being, at least for things like servers.
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@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
I feel like you would have to do a fair bit of reinventing the wheel if you were going to try to do monitoring with salt.
Depends, if you want basic stuff like CPU, RAM, uptime, etc. Salt is pretty decent and Sodium has that. If you want more than that, then yes, Salt is a poor way to handle it.
Sodium's design is not to use Salt as the basis for more extensive monitoring.
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@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
Collecting metrics and triggering alerts based on predefined characteristics would be a whole area of monitoring you would miss out on.
Collecting metrics is a core part of Salt. The events framework is part of Sodium. Those two pieces are there natively when you use SodiumSuite, it's just not extensive (yet).
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I do all my monitoring with prometheus and grafana. Stats are saved, everything looks nice, and alerts are fully customizable. Can't complain
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@scottalanmiller said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
At the moment, you'd still want something like Zabbix for monitoring if you want real time alerts. Sodium will be getting there, but isn't there yet. So you'll need to retain that old infrastructure for the time being, at least for things like servers.
Sounding like a pre-marketing spin-up?
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@Obsolesce said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@scottalanmiller said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
At the moment, you'd still want something like Zabbix for monitoring if you want real time alerts. Sodium will be getting there, but isn't there yet. So you'll need to retain that old infrastructure for the time being, at least for things like servers.
Sounding like a pre-marketing spin-up?
No, this is full on marketing.
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@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
I do all my monitoring with prometheus and grafana. Stats are saved, everything looks nice, and alerts are fully customizable. Can't complain
You should do a write up!
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@wirestyle22 plenty of those on 'dem interwebz
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@scottalanmiller said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
Collecting metrics and triggering alerts based on predefined characteristics would be a whole area of monitoring you would miss out on.
Collecting metrics is a core part of Salt. The events framework is part of Sodium. Those two pieces are there natively when you use SodiumSuite, it's just not extensive (yet).
It's good at exporting values, but you would need to integrate another tool to store the data, analyze it and send alerts based on the data over time. Which I guess is where Sodium could come in.
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@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@scottalanmiller said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
Collecting metrics and triggering alerts based on predefined characteristics would be a whole area of monitoring you would miss out on.
Collecting metrics is a core part of Salt. The events framework is part of Sodium. Those two pieces are there natively when you use SodiumSuite, it's just not extensive (yet).
It's good at exporting values, but you would need to integrate another tool to store the data, analyze it and send alerts based on the data over time. Which I guess is where Sodium could come in.
Exactly. SodiumSuite has been doing that part from the beginning. You still don't want to use Salt as the basis for anything intensive, though. It's meant to be run like 1-4 times an hour, not several times a minute.
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@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
I do all my monitoring with prometheus and grafana. Stats are saved, everything looks nice, and alerts are fully customizable. Can't complain
What about for monitoring things that aren't naturally represented as metrics?
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@flaxking give me an example
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@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
I do all my monitoring with prometheus and grafana. Stats are saved, everything looks nice, and alerts are fully customizable. Can't complain
What about for monitoring things that aren't naturally represented as metrics?
What kind of monitoring?
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@Obsolesce said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@flaxking said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
I do all my monitoring with prometheus and grafana. Stats are saved, everything looks nice, and alerts are fully customizable. Can't complain
What about for monitoring things that aren't naturally represented as metrics?
What kind of monitoring?
@dyasny Hmm, well I guess what I was thinking about probably falls under "reporting" rather than monitoring.
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@flaxking You mean actual graphs and reports on stats gathered over time? Grafana is all about that
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@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@flaxking You mean actual graphs and reports on stats gathered over time? Grafana is all about that
Grafana is only the display tool, you need something to fill in those graphs.
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@dyasny said in Monitoring with SaltStack VS Zabbix:
@flaxking You mean actual graphs and reports on stats gathered over time? Grafana is all about that
I mean like if you wanted to report on all the different OSes you have running - which I didn't think was possible using Prometheus + Grafana without determining a numeric value for each OS, but it looks like I'm wrong about that.
