open source

New open source IT management tool: Lighter-weight than Nagios, more granular than Cacti

Theo Schlossnagle, CEO and founder of managed services and hosting provider OmniTI, hopes to solve some of the common complaints with open source systems management tools with his company’s new tool Reconnoiter.

OmniTI manages 15 data centers with heterogeneous architectures for multiple clients, and Schlossnagle said he’s used every tool under the sun: Zenoss, Tivoli, OpenView, Nagios, Cacti and more.

The recurring problems Schlossnagle found with open source management tools — scaling issues, repeated effort for configuration management, and requirements for powerful server infrastructure – frustrated his team to the point where OmniTI built its own toolset for monitoring metrics, graphing data for capacity planning, and post-mortem analysis of problems.

The tool uses an agent-based system. Users would install a Noit Daemon in each important portion of infrastructure and configure it to monitor different services. The software is written in C, plug-ins are written in C or Lua. Reconnoiter uses SNMP, ITMP, HTTP among other protocols.

The company is offering it under BSD license on its Website for free.

According to Schlossnagle, challenges using the open source management software Nagios were a major driver for developing the Reconnoiter tool.

“Nagios is quite inefficient in the way it collects data,” Schlossnagle said. “It follows the age-old Unix philosophy that you use the right tool for each job. This means that Nagios ends up launching thousands of small applications to test things. While the lots of little tools philosophy is often convenient, it heavily conflicts with high performance, low latency requirements. Often purpose built tools need to take over in that role — that is what Reconnoiter is.

“I have to buy a big, expensive box to run Nagios — I don’t with the Reconnoiter agents,” Schlossnagle continued. “Nagios does fault detection, but not trending — which means I have to double my efforts by configuring both Nagios and another tool.”

Schlossnagle also said Nagios’ monitoring was centralized, so it was difficult to adding checks in the field. Managing configurations was hard to track as you deployed new services and machines.

The Reconnoiter tool polls systems to see if they’re healthy in a similar way that Nagios does, but of the open source-commercial hybrid products that are out there, Schlossnagle said the product is most similar to Hyperic.

“Hyperic takes a more holistic view of monitoring in that it includes both trending and fault detection. Reconnoiter takes this approach as well.”

The Reconnoiter tool is also designed to help IT managers analyze Web traffic events in a very granular way, even ones that happened in the distant past. “RRDTool is specifically designed to retain data within size constraints. You define how long you wish to retain data on various granularities,” Schlossnagle said. “In most systems that use rrdtool (like Cacti) recent data (like one week) is retained on five minute granularity, while data older than a week is reduced to a granularity of one hour. So, if you want to compare a spike today to one from six months ago, it is very likely that you have a defeating skew: 288 five-minute intervals for “today” and four six-hour intervals for the day in question six months back.”

Reconnoiter approaches this by taking the stance that storage is cheap. “There is not excuse for throwing any of that data away. I’ll go buy a terabyte of disk. I’m not going to search back 12 months very often, so it doesn’t need to be fast, but I need to be able to do it.”

According to Schlossnagle, watching the spike happen gives you a better understanding how traffic patterns shift during a major event, for example a Web site being picked up by a large social media site like Digg.

“If I’m looking at that spike on my systems at thirty second granularity, I can tell you how fast that spike happened. If I use the RRD tool with Nagios and Cacti, I can only see that day at that level of granularity for about six hours.”

This tool can help IT managers plan for capacity during spike scenarios and compare to events in the past.

“Our primary goal was to make our lives easier. This tool replaces an enormous amount of headache at OmniTI,” Schlossnagle said. “Making it a successful open source tool makes it even easier. One of the short term goals it to have it adopted other places and get the tool deployed in large environments.”

Today, OmniTI is slowly introducing Reconnoiter to its managed services clients. The company is currently monitoring tens of thousands of metrics across five data centers, approaching a terabyte of metric data.

OmniTI does not plan to develop a commercial version at this time, like Hyperic or Zenoss. “An open source approach with a strong community is better,” Schlossnagle said. “I don’t want to be in the tools business. If a company wants to give us money for support and indemnify them with IP rights, we won’t turn away that money.

“The key difference being the product we deliver, support and indemnify, would be the same product, not the one that has special neat features that paying customers get.”

You can give Reconnoiter a test run at labs.omniti.com.

Is open source affiliation keeping upstart systems management tools out of the enterprise?

According to IT management blogger John M. Willis, upstart systems management vendors like Zenoss and Hyperic need to tone down their open source rhetoric and take a page from their competitors like Solar Winds and Nimsoft.

“Zenoss and Hyperic beachfront with open source too much and it keeps them out of the enterprise,” Willis said. “Stop it with the open source stuff. Stop even mentioning it. Solar Winds is kicking your butt all over the place and all they’re talking about is price and performance.”

Willis isn’t advocating that Zenoss and Hyperic drop open source altogether, rather make it a line item instead of a headline.

“Almost everybody I talk to in enterprise IT management isn’t keen on open source,” Willis said. “If there’s a team that wants to run Nagios, then they usually can get a checkmark on it if they don’t have anything already in place. But if you want to rip and replace Tivoli with Zenoss, management will say ‘Eh…. I’m not sure about that.’”

If a company is going the Nagios, Zenoss or Hyperic route, they’re going hook line and sinker, according to Solar Winds senior VP Kenny Van Zant. “They’ll suffer the manual cost of configuration and maintenance that open source will bring, because they don’t even have $5000 to spend,” Van Zant said. “Or people are open source fans who want to use open source wherever they can. When there is a gap on Zenoss, the fill it with nTop, Cacti, or some other open source product of the month and integrate them all together.

“We bump up against those free tools when the open source person leaves the company,” Van Zant said. “We replace Nagios deployments. It just takes too much to keep it up and running.”

Are you willing to bring open source systems management tools into your shop? Did your management team object? Email me or leave feedback in the comments.

LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center postmortem

IDG World Expo, which organized the LinuxWorld and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo (NGDC) Aug. 4-7, 2008, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, announced the “successful completion of the show” and claimed that combined, the shows attracted nearly 10,000 participants.

An official audit of the actual number of attendees won’t be available until October 2008, but I doubt there were that many people there, and I’m not the only one. The buzz at the show this year was that there were far fewer attendees than in previous years. I also attended the VMworld 2007 show at the Moscone Center last September, and know what 10,000 people looks like at Moscone. This crowd was much thinner.

Not that having fewer than 10,000 attendees is a bad thing; some say it signals true success for Linux; the buzz about the operating system has fizzled out because it is mainstream. That might be, but I think our toilet of an economy might also be at play in potentially lower attendance.

As for the program, there were 200 combined educational sessions, tutorials and hands-on-labs among 17 tracks, including applications, mobile Linux, virtualization and advanced facilities management in the data center. We covered a handful of them, which can be found on our LinuxWorld/ NGDC roundup site.

The themes throughout the show were mobile Linux, power consumption and green technologies, and virtualization. Keynote presentations from executives at Merrill Lynch, McKesson, Cisco Systems Inc., IBM, Citrix Systems Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd., explored many of these themes.

On the exhibit show floor were companies including Astaro Corp., Barracuda Networks, Copan Systems, Opengear, Canonical, Access, Oracle Corp., DataSynapse, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Talend, Brocade, Ubucon, Bivio Networks, VMware, SugarCRM, Rackable Systems, Wind River and Dice.

New features included the Mobile Linux Conference, Software Central, Installfest for Schools, an open source voting demonstration, and the Golden Penguin Bowl.

The Golden Penguin Bowl was a contest between three geeks from Novell and SUSE against three nerds from Ubuntu who battled over who can answer the most obscure trivia regarding sci-fi, high-tech, Linux and all things geek.

The LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Awards were announced on Tuesday, Aug. 5, and a complete list of winners can be found on the LinuxWorld and the Next Generation Data Center Conference sites.

All the keynote addresses from LinuxWorld and NGDC can be downloaded from the LinuxWorld website or the NGDC website.

Next year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and Next Generation Data Center Conference & Expo are scheduled to take place Aug. 10-13, 2009, at the Moscone Center.

Facebook relying on Intel Xeon processors in Data Center build-out

The social networking website Facebook is building out its data center infrastructure using Intel Corp. processor-based systems and plans to deploy thousands of Intel Xeon processor-based servers over the next year to help accommodate its rapid growth, the two companies announced last week.

Intel will also collaborate with Facebook to determine the best configurations for its server and software using Intel processors, taking into account energy efficiency and performance.

Over the past several months, Facebook tested and benchmarked a number of server platforms and scenario, and ultimately selected the Intel Xeon 5400 series quad-core processors for its round of new deployments that begin in July.

When Facebook was contacted for more information on the systems and processors it has tested, why it chose Intel over AMD and other questions about data center infrastructure plans, it refused comment.

That said, Intel’s press statement had the following quote from Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook; “Intel has demonstrated that the performance of their systems can help Facebook scale our infrastructure and continue to deliver the best experience to users around the world.”

“When you are responsible for providing a fast, high-quality experience to more than 90 million people worldwide, every ounce of efficiency matters,” Heiliger said in the statement.

Also, since Facebook’s applications are mostly built on open source technologies, the companies stated that some of the insights from this collaboration may be contributed back to the open source community, benefiting other companies that use open source technologies.