I think Stack Exchange has a secret weapon which will likely greatly improve their backend systems. Tom Limoncelli, who used to work at Google as a Site reliability engineer (SRE), now works at Stack Exchange [1]. He pretty much wrote the bible for sysadmins entitle "<i>The Practice of System and Network Administration</i>" [2]. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more posts like this!<p>[1] <a href="http://everythingsysadmin.com/2013/09/the-team-im-on-at-stack-exchan.html" rel="nofollow">http://everythingsysadmin.com/2013/09/the-team-im-on-at-stac...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321492668/tomontime-20" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321492668/tomontime-20</a>
This oddly sounds like a death knell for Windows. I am not seeing anything here that is not in the LAMP / OSS stack as standard (graphite, nagios / Munin)<p>If we rephrase the blog post as "we could not find any good tools in the Windows devops space so we wrote them" and add it to the departure of the only CEO willing to dance on stage chanting developers developers developers and Windows is not an ecosystem but a hub with a few brave outlying satellites.<p>I am impressed by the stacke change folks and their story and skills but it feels like amazing stories of software skill written for one company and never released in the open - it just leaves no legacy
It's always nice to see new products in the DevOps space, but be careful not to re-invent the wheel if you do this kind of stuff as the open source world is coming on leaps and bounds.<p>LogStash, ElasticSearch and Kibana are a great open source stack for log management.<p>StatsD and Graphite are nice tools for metric tracking and visualization.<p>There are lots of open source dashboard offerings which combined with a bit of scripting can get you far.<p>You are also spoiled for choice with SAAS monitoring stuff such as NewRelic and Server Density, even if the OP isn't a fan of cloud based tools.
That dashboard looks really neat. I've been searching for a good Windows dashboard, and I like the patching views. Where's the download link?
jmelloy (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334778" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334778</a>) had a really good point that wasn't covered in the post, since it was a post about what we are doing not necessarily why we are doing it.<p>One of our major problems with existing monitoring and management systems is the lack of good APIs. We are a shop of developers and sysadmins who all understand the real management systems need to be composable. The system needs to understand that it won't solve every case out of the box and expose hooks into management and functionality, allowing us to tie disparate systems together and enhance their coverage. I'd rather take a bunch of existing products and put some cool dashboards on top, but most enterprise solutions (and some of the open source ones) don't offer a decent API to work with.
OK, I'll be that guy.<p>This makes that page much easier to read. Especially the headings, which are all mashed together for some reason...<p><pre><code> #content {
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
float: none;
width: 40em;
font-size: 15pt;
line-height: 1.4em;
}
h1 {
font-size: 180%;
line-height: 1.2em;
margin-top: 2em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
h2 {
font-size: 160%;
line-height: 1.2em;
margin-top: 2em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
#wrap {
width: 100%;
}</code></pre>
An interesting consulting niche would be to help companies open source software they want to release.<p>Basically:<p>- clean up code,<p>- make sure the infrastructure is sufficient,<p>- help with marketing and adoption,<p>- write documentation
Where does the patching dashboard pull data from? Is it tracked by hand or is there a scanner? We use Orion at work, and it's got a decent amount of data in it, but is kind of kludgy and slow.