[ale] Todays trends

[Jeff Hubbs]

My experience with Nagios in production was a bad one but only because 
the people who were doing it paid no attention to the nominal operating 
behavior of the servers being monitored and relied on dead-stupid 
broad-brush configurations that alarmed all the time uselessly.  And 
they wouldn't revisit their configurations in any sort of reasonable way 
because, well, that was *work*; you had to *think*!  The moral is that 
in typical (by which I mean over-servered in the extreme) environments, 
in order to use Nagios effectively you wind up having to put in the kind 
of thought and effort that would have best been put into setting up 
reliable systems in the first place.  It's a bit like a racing team 
putting half their effort into the efficiency of their tow trucks. :)

A Puppet set up I encountered as my IT career was ending had a similar 
problem, but it tended to hold everything back; whenever you wanted to 
advance anything - change to a new version of a Linux distribution (if 
you're stuck in that kind of goat-rope) or introduce a new distribution 
- you had to drag the Puppet implementation along collaterally and it 
seemed as though people would rather run ancient versions of stuff and 
suffer those consequences than do the dragging.  If anything, it seemed 
to me that Puppet and the like get used to facilitate practices that 
shouldn't be occurring in the first place:  server overprofileration.

On 10/8/13 4:11 PM, JD wrote:
> On 10/08/2013 01:46 PM, Boris Borisov wrote:
>> Back in mid 2000's when I was working actively on Linux servers my
>> major tasks were related to settings firewalls, LAMP servers,
>> networking, ISP user traffic management (today maybe irrelevant since
>> users have unlimited traffic), Qmail servers etc. Every install had
>> own hardware except VHOST sites and mail servers.
>>
>> I want to get myself up to date so please just number few of the new
>> hot technologies used by Linux administrators.
>>
>> I assume these two are "hot": Virtual servers and cloud computing.
> DevOps, CM-tools, monitoring, alarming, alerting
> Nagios, Splunk, Cacti, OpenNMS, Puppet, Chef, CFengine, Ansible are a few of the
> tools, but there are many others.
>
> When deploying servers to a public or private cloud, can you scale from 5 to 500
> servers easily with your deployment tools AND not be tied to a single cloud
> provider?  Are the deployment tools another-mouth-to-feed or do they really make
> things easier, reproducible, more secure, more flexible, idiot-proof?
>
> OpenStack seems to be gaining traction in the Fortune 50 world too. They aren't
> throwing VMware out completely, but they are looking to minimize that technology.
>
>
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