Issue 024
Hey folks, welcome to another installment of Monitoring Weekly! Did you write something about monitoring recently? Maybe got an idea rolling around in your head? Send it on over and let the community learn from you. :D
Monitoring News, Articles, and Blog posts
Building a Custom DataDog Agent Check
The author walks up through creating a custom Datadog check. Beyond just simply being valuable on its face, there’s something else to note here: the check is for the oft-used OpenVPN Access Server, which sees wide-spread from anyone running in AWS and needing client VPN services. I created a similar for collectd a while back, which all begs the question: why isn’t this provided first-party yet?! (yes, collectd has the ‘openvpn’ plugin, but it’s not for Access Server 2.0, which is a totally different beast)
The video recordings from the SF Metrics Meetup are finally available and there’s some really great stuff to watch. My personal favorites are a tie between Emily Nakashima’s talk on frontend monitoring and Justin Reynold’s talk on Netflix’s Vizceral (which comes with what I think is one of the best demos out there).
Full disclosure: I’m a co-organizer for this meetup.
Looking for an excuse to visit Amsterdam in March? Look no further: GrafanaCon EU 2018 CFP is open! CFP closes at the end of November, so you’ve got some time to think up a topic.
Looking at Disk Utilization and Saturation
Metrics are great and all…assuming you know what they actually tell you (or don’t tell you). The author takes a hard look at disk utilization and saturation metrics. Skip to the end for the immediate takeaway (spoiler: don’t rely on util%)
In a similar vein as above, the author goes through Linux delay accounting and the various uses for it. Sadly, not a lot of monitoring tools support this data yet–anyone want to take a crack at it?
A major release for Zabbix dropped this past week with what looks like a huge amount of improvements and new features. For all you Zabbix users out there, this is definitely worth looking at.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly editor