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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's pretty. It's probably great if you have one to five machines you care about, or you really want a pretty dashboard.

Notable features that I would need all relate to multi-server usage:

- central config across hosts

- alerting when values go over or under thresholds

- a mode for automatically selecting and viewing the machines which are working hardest, or not working

- a mode for viewing of a few stats across all machines

- a mode for slide-show viewing of a few stats across all machines

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Yes, for us that do have one to five machines this is awesome, because most other monitoring solutions are really annoying to deploy because they presume more than five machines :)

how about amon.cx or mmonit? or if there's no need to self host, newrelic?

Maybe "monitoring" is a poor word choice when there are no alerting/notification capabilities or statics-rollup. But there are different tools out there to do just that.

This seems super useful to zoom in one some performance characteristics of a single server to debug some issues!

Agreed, this is nicer way to see what's happening when something happen.. and if you only have one server haha.

For historical "monitoring", alerts, I still need my NewRelic / ELK kind of tools.

so from "Introducing-netdata" on their Wiki, there's this excerpt..

With netdata, there is no need to centralize anything for performance monitoring. You view everything directly from their source. Still, with netdata you can build dashboards with charts from any number of servers. And these charts will be connected to each other much like the ones that come from the same server.

So seems like this is on purpose. And if I understand this correctly, I can just build custom HTML dashboard to connect to multiple machines?

There's also https://github.com/opserver/Opserver

check out http://riemann.io/. You just have to build your own dashboard.

Your casual tone makes it sound so easy. If only that were true!

I believe he may have meant "glue one together from parts found on Github".

Case in point: https://github.com/Shopify/dashing

Not to knock on this project, I use it and love it, but the learning curve involved here is not trivial. Using it basically requires that you're an accomplished frontend developer, and all this to just display some metrics on a page.

Here's the presumed knowledge:

    * Ruby
    * Sinatra
    * CofeeScript
    * JavaScript
    * HTML
    * CSS
    * SCSS
    * Rufus
    * Sprockets

Nine different languages and libraries! Jesus H. Christ!

It's plain to see why outfits like Splunk can get away with charging as much as they do - visualizing metrics in that app is as simple as installing a deb package, logging in, and pointing it at your data source.

Setting up Dashing by hand is comparatively ...difficult.

This is why we pay companies like Datadog and SignalFX to do it right.

...or merrily trudge along with Zabbix, or curse under the cruel rule of Nagios...

Wavefront does not do a lot of marketing right now, but they have a great product

You forgot Clojure. Riemann's monitoring config is written in Clojure.

There's a much more approachable all-JS Riemann clone called Godot that I've successfully used on multiple projects, but it still requires some work to make the frontend look good.

I saw the list and thought "hey I can manage!" ... Then Clojure came along...

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