Monitoring doesn't have to hurt: Getting started with Sensu

If something is going to go down it’s important to know as soon as it does. It’s even better if you can catch it before it goes down (or at least before anyone notices). Anyone that has ever setup or maintained a nagios setup probably thinks that monitoring is a dull duty for sad people, but it’s not anymore!

Sensu is an amazingly flexible and hackable tool that was built for modern cloud architectures and for use with configuration management systems. We’ll look at how sensu is architected and how it removes the pain wrought by it’s predecessors. We’ll briefly review writing simple plugins to monitor your own services and how you can connect sensu to a graphing service like graphite or librato to monitor the same metrics you are using for alerting.

Sensu is written in ruby but plugins can be written in any language. Examples will be provided in PHP for the convenience of Drupal developers in the audience. A working Vagrant project will be provided for ease of setup and evaluation.