Show HN: l2met – Turn logs into metrics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: l2met – Turn logs into metrics

r.32k.io

44 pointsryandotsmith7 comments

Neat stuff!

In a similar vein, if you need to extract metrics from log files you don't control, collectd has a plugin for that. From collectd you can send the metrics to graphite, amqp, mongo, redis, riemann, etc. [1]

[0] https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Plugin:Tail [1] https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Table_of_Plugins

Nice work!

If you don't mind, I'm curious about a statement at the bottom of the page:

"This article was motivated by many success and failures experienced with production systems at Heroku."

Heroku is, as far as I know, more expensive than EC2. Maybe even double? With this being the case, at what point does it make sense to just run your own EC2 and set things up how you like instead of fighting against the platform?

I've only used Heroku moderately, but I've read many instance of folks spending lots of time trying to get Heroku to work how they want. It seems to me, they could've possibly spun up an EC2 instance and gotten things configured more quickly and easily.

So, to pose my question in another way: if it's possibly faster, and more cost-effective to run an EC2 instance, why do people continue to appear to be fighting against Heroku?

Allow me to provide some context for the snippet at the bottom of the page. The snippet is more of a thanks to Heroku for my employment. I wouldn't have had any of my insights related to visibility if it weren't for the super interesting problems that we have to solve at Heroku.

Pardon me then, I had taken it that you built large systems using Heroku as a platform not actually working for Heroku. You probably do have some incredible problems to solve. I was asking the question because I find the whole platform as a service category to be a very interesting realm of where technology has gone. As such, I've been curious about folks who are using Heroku for some really big things and why they chose to do so over using their own servers. Particularly from the perspective of administrators in charge of keeping said systems up and running.

A while back I gave a talk to a group of aspiring programmers. I shared with them my personal opinions on what makes Heroku great. You can find that list of things here: https://gist.github.com/ryandotsmith/4741242#heroku

Thank you for making a simple, one-page, non-flashy description of your tool. Kids these days think they need to buy a domain and make a whole web 2.0 frontend to explain how their VM-creating shell script works. It's so much easier to just scroll down and read some text.

I am glad that you noticed. Simplicity is one of my personal values. I hope it is present in my documentation & code.

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