Disclosure: I work at Icinga, so I’m not neutral on this one. This is meant to both be a discussion and half-an-ad for a free webinar we’re hosting.
I asked the r/sysadmin mods first, and they pointed me here.
A lot of monitoring advice, especially on the observability side, assumes you can install something: an agent, a collector, an SDK. Most environments have a layer where you can’t. Switches, UPS and PDUs, storage arrays, the ESXi hosts underneath everything, and the vendor appliance nobody is allowed to touch. That layer still takes production down.
My impression is that the agentless options all work, more or less, and each one comes with a “but”. SNMP, but MIB files and OIDs that move with firmware updates. Vendor APIs, but every vendor has its own. Email alerts from the device itself, but nobody reads that mailbox. Is that a fair picture, or am I missing something?
I’m trying to understand how others handle this, both for building better tools and for educational content like the webinar we’re hosting soon.
So my questions for the thread:
- What in your environment can’t run an agent, and what’s watching it today?
- When one of those boxes dies, who notices first: your monitoring, a user, or facilities?
- If your org is moving toward an observability stack, does this layer have a plan?
Which brings me to the half-an-ad part: coverage for exactly this layer is one of the topics in a free webinar we’re hosting on Oct 27 at 3 PM CET (14:00 UTC / 10 AM EDT). Kris Buytaert from Percona and Blerim Sheqa from Icinga look at what monitoring and observability each take to run, where each one’s coverage ends, and why a lot of shops run both:
Running Monitoring and Observability at Scale | Webinar