[BBLISA] Server side application/network performance monitoring tool?

[Dewey Sasser]

On 3/4/2013 3:32 PM, Jon Dustin wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for a tool to monitor application/network performance from the
>> perspective of individual Linux servers.  Requirements are simple.
>>   Must run on Linux (CentOS)
>>   Must be simple/clean to deploy, i.e. Automated/RPM
>>   Must not require modification of code or integration with a specific server
>>   May be commercial software
>>
>> In short, I'm looking for an alternative to the offering from
>> http://boundary.com/  (They fail at requirement #2).
>>
>> As I'm sure it will be asked, yes, this has to run on the individual nodes
>> as I don't have access to the network hardware or infrastructure.
> I've had very good luck with XYMON: http://xymon.com  Used to be called Hobbit, which was a fork from Big Brother. VERY lean on requirements, and definitely a simple install on clients. You can have all analysis done at the server, so performance impact on clients is minimal.
>
> Although it is more focused on availability reporting, there is a decent amount of performance monitoring as well. Xymon is also *very* extensible.
>

I also use and like Xymon, but I don't think it's a good tool for 
application performance.  While it does have some graphing features they 
are harder to customize than straight up "green/yellow/red" monitoring 
and it's rather difficult to look at long term trends or correlate 
different metrics (either intra- or inter- machine).

I tend to use Graphite for host performance metrics and while that is 
also very easily extensible for application performance, it doesn't 
monitor applications "out of the box" -- you'll need to find an 
appropriate probe to do that (I've used host sFlow for Windows and Linux 
and written my own set for Linux).  I've also written log flie scraping 
probes.  I haven't directly instrumented any app server.

I also work for a company that uses and seems quite happy with NewRelic, 
which does do host and application monitoring "out of the box" without 
source code modification.  I haven't worked with it in enough detail to 
know how well it meets the OP requirements for deployablility but it 
does meet the other requirements.

--
Dewey