Why We Built Marvel | Hacker News Reader

Why We Built Marvel

elasticsearch.org

51 pointsayanb16 comments

There's a bunch of free tools for monitoring ES also. While they aren't as pretty, they certainly get the job done.

http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/c...

I've been really impressed with how easy it was to set up and instantly identify bottlenecks within our infrastructure. Sure, other plugins have offered similar statistics (and some with a nice UI too) but to provide all of this insight out-of-the-box and in a single tool is an amazing addition to Elasticsearch, and in my opinion will help boost even more widespread adoption.

If anyone is interested, I wrote about my initial reactions to Marvel here: http://chrissimpson.co.uk/elasticsearch-marvel-monitor-and-m...

Looks _really_ great: one of the prettiest dashboards I've seen, combining logs & metrics. However, it would be a lot more interesting if it was open source; because then it would get forked and applied for monitoring other systems. It would also demonstrate that ElasticSearch is a good solution for storing monitoring data, and the potential audience for ES would be much greater.

As it stands, it looks like another company trying to monetize open-source by selling a pretty dashboard, because that is what "enterprise" cares about. That to me feels very short-term.

What's wrong with a company trying to monetize their own open source product? Do you feel they should live off donations? Or get a second job to fund their work on Elasticsearch?

Nothing is wrong with them trying, I just want to see them succeed in doing so. I was finding fault in their strategy for monetization, not in their desire to do so.

I believe customers pay for support, not for the GUI that makes support easier.

For me, the big picture is to boost ES adoption, so that the 1% of customers that pay is a bigger pie. Trying to squeeze another few hundred dollars a month out of the existing customer pool doesn't feel like a winning strategy.

But of course I"m just armchair quarter-backing: hopefully I'm wrong and ES will gain adoption because this GUI funds other developments.

Gentlemen, gentlemen.

ElasticSearch sits on top of MASSIVE investment money (closed series B). Your worries about developers needing a "second job" are not substantiated. This is not an evening hobby project of a starving developer.

And there's the rub: investors want their money back.

The pace and aggression with which ES pushes its products and services must only increase from now on. Better get used to it.

Fair points, but I think it's important to highlight the distinction between Elasticsearch BV, (the company - who will try to continue to offer commercial services and support to grow their business - fair enough) and the Elasticsearch project, which is the open source project.

As a company, Elasticsearch BV will reinvest back into the Elasticsearch project, which will increase the adoption and value of their commercial services. Both exist independently, but the success of either improves the other.

Marvel is not a "big enterprise" play, its an effort to build a product that applies to a broad user base of Elasticsearch, a product that stands on merit and gives concrete value back to any user in helping them manage and monitor Elasticsearch in production. Because it applies to such a large user base, we decided to make it super affordable so anybody should be able to allow it.

Obviously, we are still providing production support subscriptions for Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, and have been providing it for a long some time.

Actually, you can use Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana today for monitoring. There are many users that happily do that, for example, use Logstash with collectd input, store it in Elasticsearch, and build custom dashboards in Kibana. We built Marvel on top of this open source foundation.

Anyone know if the graphs use a custom library, extjs or something else? Thanks

Looking at http://demo.kibana.org/#/dashboard , they're using http://www.flotcharts.org/

They've done a great job of prettying up the dull looking defaults on flot.

I tried to install this last night and failed. I'm still on ES 0.90.5. I had previously tried to upgrade to v1.0rc and failed. In the meantime, I'm using ElasticHQ which is great.

http://www.elastichq.org/

Some feedback for the team:

This release of Marvel would have made more sense after 1.0.

The authentication and authorization of the entire system still needs work. I've got a proxy apache+LDAP in front now but it's clunky and difficult to understand/modify with plugins for example.

You should integrate Marvel and other plugins into your apt/yum repos.

Finally, keep up the great work! Truly revolutionary stuff and great building blocks for all of us out there working in this space. Thanks.

Marvel works with 0.90.9 and above, which I highly suggest you upgrade from 0.90.5 if you are on it in any case.

The interface looks a lot like grafana:

https://github.com/torkelo/grafana

Is it based on or inspired by grafana?

grafana is a fork of Kibana. Kibana is a visualization tool of data in Elasticsearch, and Marvel is based on Kibana.

So no, its the other way around.

I don't use ES but this looks awesome. What do I use is Solr, and New Relic for monitoring. It would be great if Marvel integrated with New Relic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com