Phasor Burn

Bridge to the Island, originally uploaded by Surrealplaces.

( Insert eerie incidental music here )

Jellyfish under black light at the Maui Ocean Centre. Trippy, dude!

Monitoring software is ripe for a renaissance. Now is the time to for building new tools and rethinking our problems. Leading the charge are two projects: cucumber-nagios, and Flapjack.

A systems administrator’s role in today’s technology landscape has never been so important. It’s our responsibility to manage provisioning and maintenance of massive infrastructures, to anticipate ahead of time when capacity must be grown or shrunk, and increasingly, to make sure our applications scale.

While developer tools have improved tremendously, we sysadmins are still living in the dark ages, other than a few shining beacons of hope such as Puppet. We’re still trying to make Nagios scale. We’re still writing the same old monitoring checks. Getting statistics out of our applications is tedious and difficult, but increasingly important to scaling.

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Cucumber-Nagios is natural language front end for configuring Nagios. (http://agilesysadmin.net/cucumber-nagios)

Very interesting.

Even better, flapjack is parallelized, distributed monitoring and notifications system, which appears to have aims to leverage existing Nagios system checks/probes.

I think I just wet myself.

I think this fits very well with the Apple iPad which was announced yesterday. All it would take to make this real is to develop an iPad optimized app…

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