Grafana releases OnCall open source project
grafana.com
grafana.com
For anyone out there in the same spot, I'll say that I switched my last company to Atlassian's OpsGenie and it was a 10x cost savings for the same feature set.
If cost is the only measure: I understand. But time lost in various areas of the software package (performance alone! Before we get into weird UX paradigms and esoteric query languages, shoddy search systems etc;) surely has an impact on cost. Having your employees spending a lot of time navigating janky software has a cost too.
I'm generally not a fan of Atlassian anything, but Opsgenie was really good before Atlassian purchased them and they're still really good.
On the flip side in the 8ish months I used Opsgenie I saw a litany of issues, like the mobile app silently logging people out (and thus not delivering push notifications) and the app failing to send SMS notifications. We had pages get dropped by the primary because they never got a notification.
I want exactly one feature from my pager, delivering 100% of my pages. It's not a situation where I'm ok with 99% success rate, and that seemed to be the tradeoff and what you are paying for with Pagerduty.
I really hope this project gets good enough to ditch PD. PD should literally lay off most of its staff and just maintain the existing product, cut costs and focus mostly on integrations. There is no way they have any other future.
For example, the auto-merge functionality is somewhat useful, but it sometimes gets it wrong. Both merging and splitting alerts is extremely clunky. I'd also love to be able to have policies like "this alert is low-priority outside of business hours". The ability to re-open an accidentally closed alert. The ability to edit the alerting rules (the Global Ruleset) without needing to be a super-admin, as the Power That Be are reluctant to hand that out, also, the ability to just read the Global Ruleset with my peon privileges.
… the sort of spit & polish that doesn't happen, IMO, anymore, because everything is an MVP feature, before the agile scrum PM moves on to the next MVP feature. "Polish" just accumulates in the JIRA graveyard.
> … the sort of spit & polish that doesn't happen, IMO, anymore, because everything is an MVP feature, before the agile scrum PM moves on to the next MVP feature. "Polish" just accumulates in the JIRA graveyard.
It eats away the trust and collaboration that get good work Live and adopted. IYO, is this an indictment of "Agile," or more of that org's approach to it?
"Business should focus on its core competency"
* Outsource in-house infra to cloud. This begets lock-in as every engineer is doing heaven knows what with Lambda. Still need that huge infra team to manage AWS.
* Outsource in-house metrics and visibility to SignalFx, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, etc. Still need a team to manage it. Costs get raised by more than double because we're beholden, so now we need to fund 20+ engineer quarters to migrate everything ASAP.
* Feature flagging system built in house works like a charm and needs one engineer for maintenance. Let's fund a team to migrate it all to LaunchDarkly. Year+ later and we still don't have proper support or rollout and their stuff doesn't work as expected.
Madness.
Expensive madness.
SaaS won't magically reduce your staffing needs. Open source solutions won't reduce your staffing needs either, but they'll make costs predictable. As these tools become more prevalent and standard, you can even hire experts for them.
Matvey Kukuy, ex-CEO of Amixr and a head of the OnCall project here. We've been working hard for a few months to make this OSS release happen. I believe it should make incident response features (on-call rotations, escalations, multi-channel notifications) and best practices more accessible to the wider audience of SRE and DevOps engineers.
Hope someone will be able to finally sleep well at night being sure that OnCall will handle escalations and will alert the right person :)
Please join our community on a GitHub! The whole Grafana OnCall team is help you and to make this thing better.
Seems like the /main is the culprit.
[0] Spoiler alert: it's not.
Is that a net positive?
It doesn't have anything to do, of course, with the fact that this morning we suddenly found that all our dashboards stopped working because we were upgraded to Grafana v9, for which there is not a stable release nor documentation for breaking changes.
Luckily they rolled back our account.
I just wouldn't mind to be the last to upgrade to a newer version :)
AGPL 3.0
Is there some hidden complexity or is it just a consequence of engineers building a product for other engineers? Also, any tips what worked for you?
Of course, in a few months we may have some new people having joined, some quit, or other circumstances. A single misclick when fixing that can invalidate the whole schedule and generate another. Infuriating.
Or the UI itself, might have become better tha last two years, but having to click "next week" tens of times to see when I was scheduled (since I wasnt just interested in my next scheduled time but all of them) were annoying.
I'm curious why/if this architecture was chosen. I get that it started as a standalone product (Amixr), but in the current state it is hard to rationalize deploying this next to Grafana in my current containerless setting.
IMHO, OP just stated that one could solve this with less dependencies and have the same (if not a better) result.
IMHO a fat binary written from scratch would have been a way worse choice than to use a standard stack, both in terms of bugs and time, let alone Open Source contributions or any scalability.
In terms of number of services, what do you get rid of that produce a better result? maybe RMQ and use a worse queue?, celery and write your own task manager or use another dependency?
Far less scalable, but it is dramatically simpler to deploy. Often gets you surprisingly far though. Would be interesting to know how many monitored integrations could be supported by that flow.
Not to mention that having multiple components doesn't mean it's "scalable" by default, it could happen that some part of the pipeline doesn't like multiple instances of something.
Doesn't have all the plumbing you'd want, there is a wrapper (https://github.com/bretth/django-pq/) that seems to give you an entrypoint command more like `celery worker ...` but I've not investigated it closely.
A simple way to use an RDBMS as a message queue, that has been in use since before most HN readers were born, is roughly:
- enqueue an item by inserting a row into a table with a status of QUEUED
- use a SELECT FOR UPDATE, or UPDATE...LIMIT 1, or similar, to atomically claim and return the first status=QUEUED item, while setting its status to RUNNING (setting a timestamp is also recommended)
- when the work is complete, update the status to DONE
The first software company I worked for was using this basic approach to queue outbound emails (and phone and fax... it was 2005!), millions per day, on an Oracle DB that also ran the entire rest of the business. It's not hard.
Python(Django)+Redis+[SQLite]
Python(Django)+Postgres
[Compiled Go binary]+[SQLite]
SQLite barely even counts as an architectural dependency TBH :)
https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/#architectu...
When comparing to OnCall you need OnCall AND still the rest of that Prometheus picture.
Compare with this picture where everything in the leftmost Alert Detection box is what you see in the Prometheus architecture. https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/latest/getting-started/
Just think about Gitea vs GitLab.
As for python, at least getting a dockerfile helps a lot. Otherwise it's a huge mess to get running, yes.
Python is still a hassle anyways, since the lack of true multithreading means that you often need multiple deployments, which the Celery usage here for instance shows.
Maybe I'm behind the times, but I can't figure out what you mean here. As far as I know 'java -jar' or servlets are still the most common ways of running a Java app. Are you talking graal and native image?
But using jlink for java, one can package everything to a smaller runtime distributed together with the application. So then I feel it will be not much different than a Go executable.
> The generated JRE with your sample application does not have any other dependencies...
> You can distribute your application bundled with the custom runtime in custom-runtime. It includes your application.
From the guide here https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/openjdk/11/htm...
Maintaining tenths of binaries pulled from random github projects over the years is a nightmare.
(Not to mention all the issues around supply chain management, licensing issues, homecalling and so on)
Additionally, distribution packages are tested by a significant number of users before the release.
Nothing of this sort happens around any language-specific package manager. You just get whatever happens to be around all software forges.
Unsurprisingly, there has been many serious supply chain attacks in the last 5 years. None of which affected the usual big distros.
MVS also prevents unexpected upgrades just because someone deleted a lockfile.
I guess we can argue about "big" but didn't both Arch (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-July/...) and Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Incident... and older, https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323691) have actual compromised packages? And also not five years ago, but Fedora (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-Janu...) and Debian (https://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031202) had compromises but no known package changes.
What has happened in the package ecosystem to make you believe this? Is it velocity of updates or actual trust?
I haven’t heard of any malicious package maintainers.
For other kinds of quality, I have my own tests which are much more relevant to my use cases than whatever the distro maintainers are doing.
I've been a DD and while distros do work to integrate disparate upstreams as well as possible, they rarely reject packages for being fundamentally low quality or make significant quality judgements qua their role as maintainer (only when they're a maintainer because they're also a direct user). Other distributions do even less than Debian.
In the end most distros will be saved by the fact they don't upgrade quickly. Which is also accomplished by MVS without putting another attack vector in the pipeline.
There's more than a hundred package maintainers (I'm not sure exactly how many), but the median is about 50 packages.
Do you think people can't keep up with the updates for 50 packages?
To paraphrase, all "more than a hundred" of those people need to be lucky every time.
Helm (https://github.com/grafana/oncall/tree/dev/helm/oncall), docker-composes for hobby and dev environments.
Besides deployment, there are two main priorities for OnCall architecture: 1) It should be as "default" as possible. No fancy tech, no hacking around 2) It should deliver notifications no matter what.
We chose the most "boring" (no offense Django community, that's a great quality for a framework) stack we know well: Django, Rabbit, Celery, MySQL, Redis. It's mature, reliable, and allows us to build a message bus-based pipeline with reliable and predictable migrations.
It's important for such a tool to be based on message bus because it should have no single point of failure. If worker will die, the other will pick up the task and deliver alert. If Slack will go down, you won't loose your data. It will continue delivering to other destinations and will deliver to Slack once it's up.
The architecture you see in the repo was live for 3+ years now. We were able to perform a few hundreds of data migrations without downtimes, had no major downtimes or data loss. So I'm pretty happy with this choice.
Sorry but why is rabbitmq really necessary?
To be fair, even in its current form, it should be possible to operate this system with sqlite (i.e. no db server) and in-process celery workers (i.e. no rabbit MQ) if configured correctly, assuming they're not using MySQL-specific features in the app.
Using a message bus, a persistent data store behind a SQL interface, and a caching layer are all good design choices. I think the OP's concern is less with your particular implementations, and more with the principle of preventing operators from bringing their own preferred implementation of those interfaces to the table.
They mentioned that it makes sense because you were a standalone product, so stack portability was less of a concern. But as FOSS, you're opening yourself up to different standards on portability.
It requires some work on the maintainer to make the application tolerant to different fulfillments of the same interfaces. But it's good work. It usually results in cleaner separation of concerns between application logic and caching/message bus/persistence logic, for one. It also allows your app to serve a wider audience: for example, those who are locked-in to using Postgres/Kafka/Memcached.
One of them allows a thousand different nodes on different networks to share a single dataset with high availability. The other can't share data with any other application, doesn't have high availability, is constrained by the resources of the executing application node, has obvious performance limits, limited functionality, no commercial support, etc etc.
And we're talking about a product that's intended for dealing with on-call alerts. The entire point is to alert when things are crashing, so you would want it to be highly available. As in, running on more than one node.
I know the HN hipsters are all gung-ho for SQLite, but let's try to reign in the hype train.
This is for tiny shops with 4 servers. And tiny shops with 4 servers don't have time to spin up a horrendous stack like this. I was excited to see this announcement until I saw all the moving pieces. No thanks!
At the very least, SQLite should be the default database for this product, and users can swap it out with their MySQL database cluster if they really are Google-scale.
An important question to ask is how much availability are you actually gaining from the setup. It wouldn't be the first time I see a system moving from single-node to multinode and being less available than before due to the extra complexity and moving pieces.
They chose this stack, it works for them. They’ve put it through its paces in production.
It’s as boring as it gets.
I get why you would add a relational DB to the mix. Personally, I'd like a Rabbit-free option.
i love django projects but mysql, celery and rabbitmq -- no thanks.
Redis itself has had solid support for building reliable distributed task streaming for nearly 4 years (Redis ConsumerGroups introduced in 2018).
MySQL is a weird if not slightly disturbing choice. Other than that it's a boring, battle-tested stack that is relatively easy to scale. I agree that Go is nicer, but I'm biased by several years of dealing with horrific Flask / Django projects.
I think you misspelled "beautiful"
Complexity comes at a steep price when something critical (e.g. OnCall) breaks and you have to debug it in a hurry.
Shoving everything in a container and closing the lid does not help.
It even ships in containers along with Docker Compose files and Helm charts, which would suit the deployment use cases of 99% of users. I understand that you're not using containers, but I don't think that's a limitation that many are inflicting upon themselves as of late, and if pressed, installing Docker Compose takes about 5 minutes and you don't have to think about it again.
Except when you need to pin and repin versions to comply with a security policy, which may be why you aren't even running containers in the first place
A minor note, if anyone from Grafana is around - a bunch of the links on the bottom of the announcement go to a 404.
A quick look at OnCall suggests it is more for managing fired alerts than firing alerts.
Their own screenshot has AlertManager as an alert source.
Having to run alertmanager and configure it in addition to Grafana was bad enough, now you need to run and configure another service if you want some extra functionalities for those alerts? Are they going to keep maintaining acknowledgements and scheduled silence in AlertManager now that OnCall exists? Are we going to have "legacy notifications" in AlertManager when not running OnCall, the same way there are "legacy alerts" in Grafana when updating from Grafana 7 (pre-AlertManager)?
For example, we need to run Loki ourselves, for security / privacy reasons, but wouldn't mind using hosted versions of Tempo, Prometheus and OnCall.
Right now it isn't super-easy to link e.g. self-hosted loki search queries with SaaS-Prometheus.
Do you mind if I ask what isn't super-easy about linking self-hosted loki search queries with SaaS-Prometheus? You should be e.g. able to add a Prometheus data source to your local Grafana (or securely expose your Loki to the internet and add a Loki data source to your Cloud Grafana)
In our particular scenario, we'd probably want to run Loki + Grafana locally, and then hosted Prometheus + hosted Grafana for metrics.
But would be great if we could just tell the two about each other, and under which domains they exist. That way, Prometheus-grafana could construct URLs that linked straight into Loki-grafana (that we host) for e.g. the same interval, or the same label filter (GET params).
But it would only work if I (the end-user) had access to both. That way, we don't have to expose Loki to the internet. But linking would still work.
There are quite a lot of services that does this with Github and commits. You can link from e.g. Bugsnag to Github by only telling Bugsnag your org and repo names. But Bugsnag won't have read access to Github (they also have another integration method which does require access, but that's not the one I'm talking about here).
Those types of "linking into a known URL pattern of another service" integrations are easy to setup and very easy to secure.
Im annoyed by their license choice.
But apparently when you are grafana everything looks like a dashboard UI?
Joke aside I will have a look but I didn't like the screenshots before already. I like the dashboardy thing for dashboards but otherwise it's not a really good UI system for everything else.
Of course the article isn't much better. It reads like a joke, the joke being that "on-call management" doesn't mean anything.
<<We offered Grafana OnCall to users as a SaaS tool first for a few reasons. It’s a commonly shared belief that the more independent your on-call management system is, the better it will be for your entire operation. If something goes wrong, there will be a “designated survivor” outside of your infrastructure to help identify any issues. >>
They tried to ensure that you use their SaaS offering because they care more about your own good than yourself. So humanist...
I mean, obviously they chose to address the segment of the market they could get more money out of first; I'm not contesting that. But the bit you quoted is low-grade bullshit at best. Hardly award-winning.
for someone at grafana; noticed a dead link in the post: https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/main/
Linux usually gets a pass, because most times you're just deploying it and not mucking with source code.
But a lot of places (I've worked at more that do than don't) will have rules about GPL/AGPL for libraries/infra as a whole though. Often evaluated case-by-case, but it's rare I've seen a AGPL stuff get approved for usage.
I think some of it is not wanting to deal with the cost of vigilance; i.e. you can make sure that someone is using %thing% in a way that doesn't run afoul of AGPL right now, but does legal and upper management have confidence in that being true forever and always? Engineers are still human, and corporate management + legal teams tend to hate licensing folk tromping around.
This results in refusals ranging from "This is internal for now but we will open it up later" (a fair concern) to "Somebody is worried that exposing it over the VPN to contractors would count as making it public" (IDK, I'm not a lawyer.)
That would apply for most uses of software, wouldn't it?
> This results in refusals ranging from "This is internal for now but we will open it up later" (a fair concern) to "Somebody is worried that exposing it over the VPN to contractors would count as making it public" (IDK, I'm not a lawyer.)
I've encountered variations of this problem at places I have worked in. Education goes a long way to solving this, and this example of simple usage of (A)GPL software is easy enough to explain with examples.
No idea why Linux gets a pass though.
Apple still ships bash under GPLv2 on current macOS versions. Apple hates GPLv3, which is why they're trying to switch away from bash to zsh, but for the time being they're still shipping bash.