Reconnoiter: Monitoring and Trend Analysis

Many tools exist to collect metrics and provide an administrator the information she needs to effectively capacity plan and troubleshoot problems. As these problems grow, we expect our tools to grow with us. Anyone managing hundreds of machines had felt the intense pain of collecting, correlating and making good sense of the information across all of them.

Collecting simple things like CPU, memory and disk utilization are obvious basics. Network switch ports and host interfaces are commonly polled for traffic metrics. Applications expose their own key metrics that can be trended: space, users, connections, requests or transactions processed. A good administrator goes beyond these systemic metrics and starts looking into business-level metrics like registered users, widgets sold, and credit card transaction volumes.

The sheer quantity of information is overwhelming and traditional RRDTool-based systems bust at the seams. At OmniTI we’ve seen this break down and set about creating a tool that soothes this pain. Enter Reconnoiter, a system designed from the ground up to perform at scale.

This session will be a whirlwind tour of Reconnoiter including architecture, code, configuration and demonstrations of unique features like real-time graphing of cross-datacenter metrics.