[pfranz]

I'm currently using Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager. I'm a big fan of the linux terminal, versioned config files, and separation of concerns but the rest of my team prefers web interfaces so I'm basically the only one maintaining Alertmanager. Grafana Altering looks appealing.

What have other people had success with?

[raziel2p]

Zabbix and Icinga2 were the most appealing alternatives that didn't require versioned config files for alerts last time I checked.

I think Grafana will fill the basic GUI alerting needs, though. When you need more than a simple flat treshold you usually want to get out of the GUI and ask the ops team for help anyway.

[user5994461]

I've had success with killing all the s* free open source tools (Grafana, graphite, prometheus, whisper, icinga, nagios, carbon, ganglia, influxdb, zabbix...)

And using a single paid tool that does the job better AND doesn't kill me in maintenance work.

See https://www.datadoghq.com/ as leader or https://signalfx.com/ as the second comer, or http://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it-solutions/truesight.html if you're enterprisey.

[jrv]

See http://blog.runnable.com/post/153498635761/how-we-saved-98-o... as a counter point.

[jmedefind]

I don't see how anyone can afford SaaS metrics/alert services at any sort of real scale.

$15/month/host gets expensive fast. Datadog doesn't start providing discounts till you are at 1000+ hosts.

[user5994461]

All vendors provide discount if you negotiate. ;)

$15 * 500 hosts = $7500 per month.

If you think it's expensive, I can only advise you to check how much the hardware will costs on EC2 to run the free tools, plus how much work it will take to get the 8 different and independent OSS tools to work not only alone but integrate together, plus how much additional work and maintenance to keep it working without hiccups (war story: there is nothing worse than a monitoring tool that is less reliable than the thing it monitors).

[jmedefind]

Oh I agree. That's why we ditched ec2 for our own bare metal cloud based on joyent and saved over $200k/year

[chetanahuja]

> $15 * 500 hosts = $7500 per month.

Oh that's ridiculous pricing. Any team running a server installation at any sort of scale would scoff at the pricing, and that's even before you take into account the implications of sending so much of your metrics data to a third party to be held hostage there if you decide to leave the service.

[pfranz]

At my current gig the network is air-gapped. At previous gigs even though we had Internet access, security was very tight. They also seem to rather pay 40+ hours of dev salary installing and supporting open-source or home grown tools instead of having an ongoing subscription for a few bucks a month.