[rudasn]

> It depends where you are in the world.

Exactly this. We operate in Eastern Europe with local clients, offering on-prem SaaS. If I added all my clients' servers on datadog it would very easily eat through our profit margins.

> Still it is often not worth to roll your own

I tried hard not to, but at at the end, after spending 1 week trying to setup netdata and failed, I decided not to spend another week trying to setup grafana/influx/prometheus (lot's of docs to go through), and just have some bash scripts send metrics on a $10 digital ocean node service that sends me emails/sms when something "looks bad" (eg. high cpu temperature, stopped docker containers, etc).

I gave up on aggregated logging for the time being, since I can just ssh on each server and check journal and docker logs if I need to (as long as the hard drives don't crash).

[zacksh]

The trick with the Netdata agent is to try the install script if running into trouble.

[rudasn]

Yeah, having looked at what the script does I decided to 'containerize' the agent, and that led to other issues like configuring email alerts etc.

I was already a week deep into looking at various options and had to deliver on basic metrics and alerting, so I figured a couple of bash scripts, that log into local files with log rotation, systemd, and a dump/memory only receiving end running on nodejs for the alerts would be much faster and easier to maintain.

So far so good.

[Godel_unicode]

Tangent: what's the difference between on-prem SaaS and just "software"?

[smoe]

I guess it refers to them servicing (updating, reacting to downtime, etc.) the software, while it being deployed on premise? In contrast to the clients IT department doing so.

[rudasn]

Yes that's right.

[rudasn]

We provide both the hardware and the software. Our clients are pretty small, with no IT staff, and no technical expertise.

[randoramax]

it used to be called "private cloud", wasn't it?