graphite too complicated
Been doing monitoring stuff for almost 20 years now, started with MRTG, then built my own custom graphing with rrdtool and rrdcgi which handled probably 10 million data points a day back at the time(after I left the company they deployed Zabbix, and 3 years in they were still using my custom graphs), then moved to cacti(which was great/easy for end users but crap for anything else), now my tool of choice is a SaaS platform called LogicMonitor (though it's not nearly as good as it was when I first started using it, I really HATE HATE HATE their new UI that was forced upon the customers, one of the many downsides to a SaaS platform, took 6 months to fix an annoying UI bug that didn't exist in the older UI). The org I am at has had graphite (and collectd, and more recently statsd/grafana) deployed for the past 5 years. Maybe I need 3 hands to count the number of times I have used graphite, it's just such a pain to get data out of. Maybe if you are a math wiz or something. Or maybe there is a (much) better web front end out there that I just haven't seen(I never set graphite up someone else on my team did)
I don't doubt it is a good tool for some out there, but I can't bear to use it, other people on my team use statsd/grafana I haven't spent more than 30 minutes playing with that since it was deployed.
The core things I really love about logicmonitor that I haven't seen elsewhere is the ease of use with dynamic graphs/dashboards. Also integration with a ton of things I use whether it is virtualization, firewalls, switches, load balancers(back in the day I must've spent 200 hours getting complete F5 bigIP stuff into the cacti servers I had at the time), power strips, servers, apps, etc. If there was a non SaaS version of this kind of product I would jump on it but so far have not seen nor heard of anything that comes close in these areas. Logicmonitor does other things too but I only use it for graphs and dashboards. I also ported my custom 3PAR monitoring that I developed for cacti starting about 10 years ago to LM(about 20k data points/minute coming from my arrays), and that works great too, with cacti I literally created over 1,000 graphs by hand for storage alone the last time I used it because it wasn't built to do what I was trying to use it for. In the end it worked, but there was so much manual work involved in maintaining it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
