bhuga

It's cheap, it's already working in my project, it has a nice test stub, automatic reconnections, flash fallback for older browsers, support is responsive and effective, even when it's my fault.

The many toy pusher clones need to worry about the 90% of a project that is the polish before pusher will go away.

Too bad I already blocked all of these social news readers a while ago, for all of same reasons this extension hopes to solve.

As an American who lived in southwest Spain for a year, I can say that the market down there is garbage, and that your clients will be friendlier and respect your skills more elsewhere. I left with enough personal and secondhand knowledge of bad experiences working in the area that I would never work for any Spanish or Portugese company. I know Americans there that love it but have a strict rule against doing local work.

The good news is that's still a wonderful place to live, and just about everywhere else pays rates that let you live the good life down there. Work your github, work your twitter, work your blog, and get remote work. If you're good, or even mediocre and professional, there's tremendous demand for programming talent.

You're not crazy. Your area is screwy.

A related topic that drives me nuts after years of operations is the fairly widespread use of '.int' to represent private DNS on an internal network. '.int' is a rarely used TLD for international organizations created by treaty. It is so rare that many browsers do not recognize it as such and will ship you off to a search for 'www.nato.int', for example. Nonetheless, it drives me batty whenever I see 'dns1.int'.

Cool widget. A list of what licenses score what would be pretty neat. The unlicense (http://unlicense.org) gets 244.

I'm riding the learning curve of the business end of a startup, coming from the technical side, and it has caused me to really rethink most 'problems' in the world as opportunities. Most things in life are just some hard work away from being a fun job solving a fun problem. Everything is easier than it looks if you just start doing it.

The end result is quite mixed. On the one hand, it's a wonderful kind of optimism to look around and see opportunity everywhere, instead of something to gripe about. I used to wonder how people could really get excited about crazy futurists like Aubrey de Grey, but I now have that same optimism about humanity (if not, for this case, in my lifetime).

On the downside, I have a lot more trouble getting along with friends who have 'jobs', finding myself unable to be quiet when they do casual griping during a football game, and suggesting that they just go fix it. This is difficult, since it turns out that complaining is a pretty core part of how people casually relate to each other.

I like this question. Good stuff.

None of the players are tied to Ruby, but the agents are often written in it (not ideal, as the usual 35MB memory footprint adds up over many servers).

In any event, don't take my call for research as a call not to join the party. The fact that you haven't heard of them means that none of them have quite solved the product/market fit stage and made it to ubiquity. Being intimidated or imitating them would not be the way to go, but knowing about them would probably be useful, and they have some good ideas.

(alternately, it means that most people prefer to do this in-house, and there's just not a market there. But I don't believe that, this is such boring stuff that happens on every project...)

anyways, good night and good luck

If you can correlate semantically-parsed log data with time series to automatically understand that particular problem, you're solving problems harder than server monitoring and applying them to server monitoring, IMO :) Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I looked into purchasing this exact kind of service a few months ago. I admit that it was tough to find them--they are often not on the front page of google--but there were 3 or 4 players in addition to varying installable tools (sorry, names now forgotten). None really seemed to be what I want, and they were not particularly cheap. I didn't buy any, which is a customer looking to buy in the space and not finding a solution, so by all means give it a go. But you're missing some homework if you had not yet found Scout, which is front and center in this space. One of them even had a whizbang way to edit and test your little agent plugins in the browser in ruby (was that scout?) You have some mature competition here you should consider.

I've thought about creating this about 5 times; the existing services really haven't gotten it quite right, IMO. For me, exactly what metrics to measure are not as important as the poor correlation tools. The usual suspects are fine for 'easy' and the non-usual suspects will always require custom scripts.

More important for me is letting go of 'server stats'. The existing tools you mention are stuck in pre-cloud days, assuming that I care about a graph for a particular server as opposed to the average/95th %tile/99 %tile across a group of servers filling a role.

The best solution I've found is OpenTSDB, which lets me tag any data point, which lets me tag web server CPU use metrics as 'web' and not worry about when machines go up and down when I'm looking at web server CPU use. But OpenTSDB is a pain to setup and if someone jazzed up the graphs and made it a service, I'd buy it.

then upvote, tweet, and refer, and save some bandwidth when your project gets boring. This stuff is growing all the time down here.