Happy Sysadmin Day! Cloudkick Developer plan: all features, 1 server, SMS alerts | Hacker News Reader

Happy Sysadmin Day! Cloudkick Developer plan: all features, 1 server, SMS alerts

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Super impressed. In 20 minutes I was able to hook up my personal Linode with a level of monitoring that probably would have taken a few hours to pull off manually.

I don't think I would have considered using the paid service before, but this free account offers a compelling experience. I bet it'll pay off in conversions.

Sounds like you set up the Cloudkick agent. If you really want to take advantage of the agent, try out some custom plugins (https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Custom_Plugins). We've cleaned up a few that we use internally and made them available at http://github.com/cloudkick/agent-plugins

Indeed. I'm a Debian user, so it only took a minute to get the agent running which I appreciated a lot.

It seems like the only piece missing is graphing and alerting on bandwidth usage with the agent. Linode provides a nice set of hypervisor-level views of IO/CPU/Bandwidth but they're really only useful historically and from a billing perspective. On second thought, this sounds like an awesome way to get familiar with the plugin interface ;)

There's a bandwidth check type. Click on the monitor tab, then click on new monitor, then select Bandwidth in the check type drop-down.

We don't support alerting on bandwidth usage yet, but that check will alert if the interface is down.

Any way to build the agent from source? I run Arch Linux on my Linode and would love to try out the added functionality.

The plan is to open source the agent in the near future.

Disclaimer: I work at Cloudkick

In case there's any ambiguity, Cloudkick isn't giving a cloud server instance to everyone for free. The developer plan lets you monitor and manage one server for free. It has all the other features of paid accounts though: SMS alerts, custom plugins for monitoring, etc. I use it for my one EC2 instance that acts as my personal web server/IRC bouncer/VPN server/whatever.

I tried to add a cell number for getting SMS alerts. The "save and test notification" prompted me with "Notification sent!", but several minutes later I've yet to see a message.

Also, if you're interested in a paid plan, we're offering 15% savings for the next 48 hours!

Use the promo code: "cksysadmin" or visit https://www.cloudkick.com/pricing/cksysadmin

We use CloudKick to monitor some of our servers and it is just completely awesome. It's way easier than monitoring a bunch of servers with htop and much quick than trying to roll your own solution.

I'm really excited to try this... <s>sadly I'm getting time-out issues when trying to set up monitoring with my Linode API key but I'm guessing you guys might be under a lot of load with this promo?</s>

It's working now. It looks as though it didn't want to add a node until I authenticated my email address even though it took me directly to an "add node" flow directly upon signup.

I also can see a lot of conversions from this.

As others have pointed out, I have timeout errors with linode.

One thing of concern for me is that giving away my linode API key is not something I really would like to do. I don't use this key for anything at the moment, but my understanding is that it gives to the holder the right to delete my linode. not WANT. Arguably it's more a linode problem that it is cloudkick's

Your API credentials are the keys to the kingdom, so you're rightly cautious about giving them out.

However, we can proudly say that with nearly one million servers having passed through Cloudkick without being inadvertently rebooted, terminated, or otherwise... statistically, it's probably more likely that you'll accidentally terminate it yourself manually than that something untoward will happen to it if you're managing it with us. Our entire business is based on making server management better, easier, and safer for you and we do everything we can to make our service infallible.

In fact, some of the initial inspiration for our dashboard was that existing tools made it too easy to accidentally kill the wrong machines. Some providers give nodes names that aren't exactly user-friendly, and without some basic sorting and labeling tools, eventually almost anyone would make a mistake. So, we added coloring, sorting, and renaming to mitigate that kind of user error.

Also, on the subject of security, we just added the ability to require multi-factor authentication to log in to your Cloudkick account. You can choose to require a YubiKey, one-time SMS code, or one-time email code to access your dashboard. We did a brief write-up on our blog if you're interested in learning more: cloudkick.com/blog

Thanks for the answer.

I forgot to test one thing before terminating my trial (nice job by the way, the complexity is just a bit overwhelming initially): Is it possible to remove the API key once the initial setup is done as long as the agents are running on the monitored machines?

It is possible, but you'll need to add the "name" option to the agent config in /etc/cloudkick.conf.

Here's the documentation: https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Cloudkick.conf

Would love to see a slightly smaller plan for 2-3 servers or a little more flexibility for those of us that don't have 6 servers...yet! :D

I agree, there are many of us who for our own use just have 2 or 3 servers. For customers/companies, the rates seem reasonable.

I signed up and am looking forward to trying it out for a new project I'm working on. Just a weird site note: for some reason, my browser is locking up for a few seconds every time I click on a link in my dashboard. My CPU usage is spiking. Can anyone much smarter than I hazard a guess as to what's going on?

Hey there. If you want to jump into #cloudkick on freenode, or jump into our support chat (it's the link down at the bottom-left of your screen) and provide a few more details, we will try to figure out what's happening.

Hmm. I just tried to sign up and get a 403: "CSRF verification failed. Request aborted."

Hi, I took a quick look, and it looks like you were using Opera -- We are spining up people to double check in opera right now, but I'd suggest re-trying in Firefox or Chrome

Yep, I'm one of those.

We confirmed it works in Opera 10 -- I got scary faces made at from the webdevs me when I suggested supporting Opera 9!

Strange. I'm on 10.50 and it's still 403. Updated to Opera 10.60: 403.

Edit: nevermind, I got it to work. Must have had referrers turned off. I rarely see that cause a failure, so it wasn't on my normal checklist.

Sorry for the noise!

I signed up in Opera 10.60, but couldn't get it to add my Linode instance. Had to do it in Firefox to get it to accept my API key.

I was going to sign up but their terms and conditions -- especially number seven is a full stop for me three as well. They should really let you know.

To be clear: if they terminate your use of Cloudkick, your servers keep running - they just aren't being monitored anymore.

Really nice! I just signed up, and set up my sandbox EC2 quickly, and I find the feature set meets my needs. The free price to monitor my EC2 is great, and will likely pay off for Cloudkick when I recommend them to my customers (I always like it when customers use the same tools I use for my stuff - makes life easier.)

It there no way to quickly add a default set of monitors? Because it seems quite tedious to add them one at a time just to get an idea of how the service works.

It's not available for chunkhost.com. I'd love to try it out on chunkhost

It looks like they just offer normal virtual servers with root access.

By looking at the supported OS images, you shouldn't have problems installing Cloudkick agent (https://support.cloudkick.com/Setting_up_Cloudkick_with_Phys...) on any of them.

Actually, the installation should be pretty simple, because we already offer pre-built packages for all of the systems currently supported at chunkhost - https://support.cloudkick.com/Agent/Installation.

If you do encounter a problem, feel free to stop at #cloudkick @ FreeNode and we will look into it.

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