Monitoring Software

[Danny Howard]

Jed,

I think that what a lot of folks want, or at least what I like, is to
start with a quick and intuitive overview of overall system health,
and then be able to drill down and eyeball long-term trends, as well
as nice monitoring, and optionally, the ability to take a peek at
system stats at an arbitrary point back in time.

The screen shots on your web site don't seem to express that your
product does this.  The very first screen-shot:

http://www.bixdata.com/node/89

You've got three panes, and a whole bunch of interfaces.  The page
layout is so busy that you can not see the graph legend.  This seems
representative of the screen shots you have to offer.

My favorite graphs are from Orca.  I LOVE that the way Orca does
things, you can either look at a page of graphs from a particular
server over a particular time period, or you can look at a page of
graphs for a particular aspect of several servers over the same time
frame.  Graph legends are stuck right there in the graph, really
legible.

But Orca is not a monitoring program.

I also like Big Sister, which is a non-commercial knockoff of Big
Brother.  A fairly simple overview: red-yellow-green lights in a grid,
suggest what's good and what's questionable.  It even has some trends
graphing, through RRDtool, like Orca.  Unfortunately, Orca puts BS's
graphs to shame.

My biggest gripe about Big Sister is that writing plugins is freaking
complicated.  Can't help that . . . though, I have found that you can
connect to the server on port 1984 and send status information in.

Anyway . . . . . just thought I'd put in my 2c. :)

-danny