Generic server monitoring with Monitis & M3

Had I been told to monitor a cat chasing a mouse with Monitis, my answer would have been – “Yes, it’s probably possible”.
With the not-so-recent addition of M3 to the arsenal of monitoring tools Monitis can utilize, it is possible to monitor anything. However this alone is far from being enough. Smart implementations of proper applicative monitoring is what should be practiced.

Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) framework usage and examples were outlined in a few previous articles:
M3 – introduction
Planning your vacation / HTTP extraction
However we’ve never explained the bits and bytes behind it and what was the initial motivation for implementing it.
This article will outline the motivation, design, implementation and perhaps also the future road map for M3.
Rereading my previous articles I realized that I generated a somewhat steep learning curve for using M3 with the complex examples provided, just because M3 can handle these complex scenarios.
However M3 was created in order to simplify things. I’m going to use an extremely simple example in the following article to explain the way M3 works this time, I promise!

press release

SAN JOSÉ, CA., June 27, 2011 –  Any system administrator worth his or her salt knows that data is the oxygen of the modern age.

To keep the oxygen flowing Monitis Inc., the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one systems monitoring platform, announces that users can now monitor their MySQL-operated database servers on Monitis’s free monitoring service – Monitor.Us. The new hosted MySQL monitoring service is available immediately.

“Our new MySQL monitoring service ensures high availability of database servers and performs a host of tasks to ensure MySQL is running smoothly,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “And because MySQL is the most popular database in use today, perhaps never before can so many system administrators get so much for free.”

Over the last couple of months, Monitis, through a series of blog posts, has provided guidance on picking the right NoSQL database storage tool that meets your company’s needs. In our previous blogs, we offered a comprehensive overview of why NoSQL technology is important and how it compares with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs).

In our posts, we have also reviewed various brands — again, in the hopes that this information will help choosing NoSQL DBs such as Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Riak, HBase and others…easier.

In this, our last post on the subject, let’s take a look at two more popular brands: Apache’s CouchDB and Membase.

In a series of blogs, Monitis has begun providing guidance on picking the right NoSQL database storage tool that meets your company’s needs. In our previous blog, we offered a comprehensive overview of why NoSQL technology is important and how it compares with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs).

Now, we’d like to get a bit more specific and review various brands. We hope that this information will help choosing NoSQL DBs such as Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Riak, HBase and others…easier. After all, you want to make sure that your data is being stored safely. Aren’t there enough worries out there about data security – whether the data is being stored on the cloud or behind your internal, private firewall?

Gosh; there are so many NoSQL database storage tools out there. It’s almost as bad as brands of sport drinks or water. Have you noticed that some mega-supermarkets have whole aisles dedicated to what we drink!

As an IT system administrator or manager, it’s sometimes very hard to compare various NoSQL tools. It involves considering your special computing needs, matching them to what is out there, aligning what’s right for your organization and then make the right decision!

That’s why Monitis, the first hosted all-in-one network and systems performance monitoring service for sysadmins, is publishing a series of blogs that are meant to offer a comprehensive guide to NoSQL technology and brands. We want to help you make the right choice that fits the particular needs of your company.

Why should we care, you may ask yourself? Increasingly, our clients, who depend on our ability to monitor servers and networks and a host of other key metrics 24/7 from the cloud, want our advice, too, on what kind of scalable and robust database technology to use. So, we’re obliging!

Here, in a series of blogs, we’ll present research on existing popular NoSQL data storage tools that are generally intended to store unprecedented large amounts of data, offer flexible and horizontal scalability and provide blazing-fast processing queries. We’ll also get down to the nitty-gritty and compare several well-known NoSQL DBs…such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Riak, HBase and others.

In this first post, let’s discuss the reason why NoSQL technology is important.