Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on replacing and improving our existing monitoring and trending setup with Prometheus. After searching online, we haven’t been able to find a Prometheus metrics exporter that could act as a drop-in replacement for pmacct, which is why we’ve decided to develop it ourselves, called promacct. Where proamcct differs from pmacct is that instead of periodically storing results to a database, it provides access to its metrics over HTTP, allowing Prometheus to scrape it directly. Today we’re glad to announce that we’re releasing promacct as Open Source Software. Be sure to give it a try and let us know whether it works for you.

Yesterday, Logstash 1.4.0 was released containing many improvements, one of which was contributed by us. We’ve implemented signature verification and packet decryption in the collectd input plugin. This blogpost will give an overview of how encryption and signing is used in the collectd binary protocol. If you want to implement your own collectd receiver, this is pretty interesting.

One of the things we take very serious here at Kumina is our monitoring. We’ve always done so, but even we must admit that during the starting years, we sometimes forgot to include all possible checks for a new service or host. And it sucks when you forget to setup the monitoring for a specific item, because you generally only find out about it when it’s actually down already… We like to check as much as possible (if not everything). Here’s an explanation on how we actually deploy our monitoring and trending based on the applications that are installed.

We wanted to trend our puppetmaster to give us an idea of the amount of nodes and the time it takes to compile a catalog. Searching on the web didn’t yield the results we needed, so we made our own.