[ajmurmann]

I am currently planning adding monitoring to some toy apps I hosted on a raspberry pi cluster. The intent is that this might safe me time and stress further down the road. If a new version makes performance worse, I want to see that in the data. If resource needs go up, I want to know that before it's time to move, so that I can plan without any kind of scheduling stress. (I also want to do this in part as an exercise which is partial motivation for the cluster and most things I built that run on it. But don't tell anyone!)

Am I misguided?

[strogonoff]

Well, as far as I’m concerned, if they are toy apps, why stress? If they are going to go in production at some point, then sure; but this certainly is not happening with a family game server.

[ajmurmann]

Family game server going down can be very stressful, especially if you have kids.

Also, I've had phone tech support sessions with family that were more stressful than calls with large banks who were worried about losing very large amounts of money in case of an outage. Different stressful, but nonetheless...

[strogonoff]

> Family game server going down can be very stressful, especially if you have kids.

Telemetry does not address this, though. Shoving it into a container and assigning it a simple “restart if down” rule does. Minecraft is a flaky beast, if you run snapshots and/or mods. Metrics or not, often “start again” is all you need.

Furthermore, this is a game that adds new gameplay features multiple times per month. If you do not update it frequently and your kid misses out on a new mob, you run into the same stress. Containerizing it makes the upgrade very straightforward, and once you run a couple of containerized instances… Do you not struggle to see the value of detailed system monitoring?

[mmanciop]

> Telemetry does not address this, though. Shoving it into a container and assigning it a simple “restart if down” rule does.

A Systemd unit as shown in [1] does it too without using containers and with fewer moving parts of using containers. I use containers every day at $work. I have been using containers since before Docker was a thing. In this case, it's entirely overkill: Systemd units use the important things like cgroups already.

For the upgrade: depends. You do need a container image regardless, and I have not seen official ones. Upgrading servers in Minecraft requires upgrading clients to match, and my kids prefer to play, more than upgrade. (Unless a biome is released. Then it must be immediately available to them.) But then again, I just need to download the binary with a cURL call. And if the configurations change, Docker won't help me there one bit anyhow.

[1] https://github.com/dash0hq/minecraft-server/blob/main/drople...

[strogonoff]

There are no official ones (Microsoft profits from operating its own servers, why would it make things any easier), but there are community-maintained images.

I found that vanilla server is insufficient and an ability to declaratively define mods, the seed, OP players, etc. through container environment is very important for iterative evolution, but of course this is individual.

[mmanciop]

Indeed.

My personal definition of nanosecond is the time passing between the Minecraft server having a hiccup, and the first scream piercing the air.

The printer not printing is DEFCON 5 material.

[jauntywundrkind]

Seeing what computers are doing is good, actually. Period.

[strogonoff]

This is a real-time game. What the computer is doing is directly in front of your eyes.

[jauntywundrkind]

I know I sound like a freak to you, but you sound like a deranged freak to me too. Who would opt for ignorance? Who would opt not to have data? Who would opt not to see more? Its insanity to me to resist enrichment so.

Limiting yourself to only naive senses is a wild proposition to me. The scientific mindset compels us to see further: it is a wild privilege to see more, to build and use tools that expand how we can see.

[strogonoff]

I don’t think you’re deranged. I do think this is a post about using telemetry 1) in (to me) excessive ways that defeat the point of the thing being measured 2) published on the website of a company that sells said telemetry solution.

Furthermore, to me useless or excessive data is very much a reality (if you do not agree that it is a possibility and a thing that happens, we have clearly no way of understanding each other), and per my criteria it is just that sort of data in this use scenario.

[mmanciop]

To be fair, the setup of the article works with most modern observability solutions, in same cases just by replacing the endpoint and authentication token. Turning telemetry processing into a sort of utility is one of the great things that OpenTelemetry did. Now, among vendors, we compete on delivering insights on the telemetry, as opposed to just collecting it. If you are interested, I wrote about it a while back [1].

About excessive telemetry, that depends on what you want to achieve. Using facilities in the OpenTelemetry Collector like [2], you can easily drop all telemetry you have no use for. At the cost of tooting my own horn, we actually provide super easy ways of doing the same dropping at no charge whatsoever to the end user in Dash0 [3].

[1] https://thenewstack.io/is-otel-the-last-observability-agent-...

[2] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...

[3] https://www.dash0.com/changelog/spam-filters