Monitoring

 
 
 
 
 
 

 with ZenOSS

Agenda

  • The Zen of monitoring
    • What is monitoring? What is it for?
    • The koans of monitoring
  • The dharma of alerting
    • What is alerting?
    • Alert categories
    • Anatomy of an alert
  • The Kaizen with ZenOSS
    • What is ZenOSS?
    • Basics
    • Metric collection
    • Data to information
    • Alerts and notifications

What is monitoring?

  • Observe: State, Changes
  • Identify: Events, Trends

What is it for?

  • Baselining
  • Evaluation
  • Prevention
  • Analysis
  • Planning
  • Automation

The koans of monitoring: Metrics

  • Metrics are storage data structures for numeric inputs
  • Time sliced inputs extracted from metrics are timeseries
  • Statistical calculations can be applied to timeseries
  • Combining those timeseries, these statistical calculations, and grouped with other timeseries, we got informational charts
  • These charts answer the koans on the system

The koans of monitoring: Units

  • Amounts are collections of values. Generic quantity stats. Matches in a search result, visitors, or packet sizes.
  • Time delays shows time taken to complete something. Watch out average and high percentiles. CPU cycles per process, seconds per request, or minutes per visit.
  • Amount per time depicts speeds and performance. Good to see distribution in high percentiles. Bitrate, IOPS, requests per minute, or monthly visitors.

The koans of monitoring: Quantities

  • Flow recording events, usually aggregated. Consider distribution and high percentiles.
  • Throughput, usually rates over time periods, represent continuity and intensity. Use them for thresholds and bottleneck identification.
  • Stock arise assets' quantities. Single metrics.
  • Availability are aggregated on expected results. Can be seen as percentage.

The koans of monitoring: Some stats

  • n
  • sum(n) of values from all inputs
  • avg(n) Arithmetic mean
  • max(n), min(n), p90(n), p95(n) Extreme values
  • σ(n) Standard deviation

What is alerting?

  • Detect: Changes, Events, Alarms
  • Avoid: False positives and negatives
  • Notify: Proper recipients
                    

Alert categories


Anatomy of an alarm

  • An alarm is a boolean function
  • Result changes are alarm state transition
  • It is composed of relations between inputs:
    • Metric monitors: Thresholds on metric values
    • Date/time evaluations: Alert in periods
    • Other alarms: Coindicence of more alarms

What is ZenOSS?

  • IT monitoring and alerting platform
  • Open source
  • Extendable
  • Standard-based
  • Automatable
  • Flexible

What does it provide?

  1. Discovery and inventory
  2. API to interact with
  3. Metric collection, graphing, and alerting
  4. Event logging 
  5. Cross-referenced reports
  6. SNMP, SSH, JMX, WMI, Nagios, NRPE
  7. Monitoring daemons
  8. Small fingerprint

Basics

  • Navigation
  • Adding nodes
  • Node details

Metric collection

  • Monitoring templates
  • Nagios perfdata
  • Daemons

Data to information

  • Reports
  • Graph creation

Alerts and notifications

  • Events
  • Triggers

Monitoring  with ZenOSS

By Ignasi Fosch Alonso

Monitoring  with ZenOSS

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