We use Riemann at Two Sigma to monitor/alert/heal our Mesos cluster [1], precisely because of above reasons to reject.
>- You must pick up Clojure to understand and configure Riemann (we're not a Clojure shop, so this is a non-trivial requirement)
>- Config file isn't a config file, it's an executed bit of Clojure code
This is actually great -- static files quickly become their own franken-languages, with code generating config files.
>- Riemann is not a replacement for an alerting mechanism, it's another signal for alerting mechanisms (though since it's Clojure and the configuration file is a Clojure script, you can absolutely hack it into becoming an alerting system)
>- Riemann is not a replacement for a trend graphing mechanism.
You probably don't want another alerting mechanism; you probably already have pagerduty or something else -- what you want is a rich way to create the alert.
> You probably don't want another alerting mechanism; you probably already have pagerduty or something else -- what you want is a rich way to create the alert
This is the heart of why we use Riemann. When we first started using it 2 years ago, we had thousands of different types of error emails per day (due to monitoring thousands of retail stores, all with their quirks). Because Riemann config is just code, we were able to build systems and abstractions on top of it for describing the various error types and their semantics. E.g If 500s are being returned from service A, only alert us if > 1% of those requests failed in the last 2 minutes. You can get these kinds of rules in something like Nagios, but if you want customization, you have to deal with plugins. Here, it's just code. If we don't like it, we change it. The result is that there's no excuse to setup gmail filters. You can ensure that all errors are actionable.
>- You must pick up Clojure to understand and configure Riemann (we're not a Clojure shop, so this is a non-trivial requirement) >- Config file isn't a config file, it's an executed bit of Clojure code
This is actually great -- static files quickly become their own franken-languages, with code generating config files.
>- Riemann is not a replacement for an alerting mechanism, it's another signal for alerting mechanisms (though since it's Clojure and the configuration file is a Clojure script, you can absolutely hack it into becoming an alerting system) >- Riemann is not a replacement for a trend graphing mechanism.
You probably don't want another alerting mechanism; you probably already have pagerduty or something else -- what you want is a rich way to create the alert.
[1] https://github.com/twosigma/satellite