Ask HN: What are the monitoring tools you use?

Nagios is great if you manage bare metal.

If you have a very dynamic environment (a.k.a. virtualisation, cloud, etc) usually you have to go one level furter and integrate your provisioning tools with the monitoring (and backups) system.

I've never used sensu, but I've write my own monitoring and reporting tools many times. I can recommend you to try to get that skill, learn howto script a protocol and report, etc... probably you will need it to adapt your monitoring tool, whatever you choose.

I guess I need to know more about what you want to monitor. We use nagios (host/service up/down notification), ganglia (host metrics like ram/disk/etc), and MRTG for bandwidth etc, and rsyslog with tenshi for log alerting. If you are a sysadmin then you probably want nagios. I would be suspect of new shiny things, nagios is rock solid and is used as an industry standard for monitoring in many open source shops (think universities, HPC clusers, etc).

p.s. I run a sysadmin screencast site @ sysadmincasts.com. I'll try and do a nagios episode in the next couple weeks.

We use:

* SPM for monitoring and alerting for our ElasticSearch, Solr, Hadoop, and HBase clusters, as well as Java (web)apps + the usual server metrics + custom business and performance metrics

* Sensu for server metrics monitoring + alerting

URLs:

* http://sematext.com/spm

* https://github.com/sensu

New Relic is primarily a tool for monitoring and diagnosing on the application lauer, although they have recently expanded their offerings.

For monitoring servers, I'm currently using munin and pingdom.

Zabbix!