Phill Barber's Blog

Choosing a suitable monitoring framework for your system is important.  If you get it wrong you might find yourself having to re-write your checks and setup something different (most likely) at great cost.  Recently I looked into a few monitoring frameworks for a system and came to a few conclusions which I'll share below. Background The System At the time of this investigation, the system (which has a microservices architecture) was in the process of being "productionised".  It had no monitoring in place and had never been supported in production.  The plan was to introduce monitoring so that it could be supported and monitored 24x7 with the hope of achieving minimal downtime. Warning - I am biased Before we get started, I have to acknowledge a few biases I have.  I have worked with nagios in the past and found it to be  bit of a pain.  However, this was probably due to the fact we created our checks in puppet which added an extra layer o...

Recently I needed to share an Ansible inventory with multiple playbooks in different code repos.  I couldn't find a way to do this nicely without writing some new code which I'll share here. Trisha Gee sums up how I feel about this...  "I'm doing something that no-one else seems to be doing (or talking about). That either means I'm doing something cool, or something stupid."   Perhaps I missed an ansible feature, if so, please let me know!  I am new to it.  If not, perhaps ansible could add support for this. EDIT 19/7/2015 I'm now of the opinion that this is a bad idea.  Regarding the Trisha Gee quote above - I now know what it was I was doing (hint... not cool).   I am no longer sharing inventories as now all of our ansible deployment config (except a few roles) are in one git repo.  This same repo holds our inventories so no need for sharing.  If I did have to share them, I'd use git sub modules.  The solution detailed ...