Most of the writes to my database comes from the monitoring solution Zabbix(which is really nice). I first had to modify the SQL file that is used to create the database for Zabbix since Percona XtraDB cluster demands that all tables have a primary key. I similarly had to modify the template used by Zabbix to graph Ceph-data but now I’m feeding that data to InfluxDB and Grafana instead.
I’m a little bit skeptical about using MySQL as a backend for monitoring data generally but apart from that I’m really pleased with Zabbix. I’ve used Nagios, Cacti, OpenNMS and briefly even Zenoss back in the day but don’t miss them. Especially not Cacti…
For most hosts I use Zabbix Agent for data collection but for networking equipment SNMP is used.
I could use IPMI as well for my physical servers but that already goes to Grafana via collectd. I feel like Grafana is good for performance monitoring while Zabbix does better with keeping track of things being up and running. It has great default settings, keeping track of swap space, IO Wait and so on with built-in triggers that generate alerts. Grafana can do lots of that but with more effort.
Having installed zabbix-agent and modified zabbix_agent.conf manually like 50 times in the past two months I’m really starting to pine for Puppet. Same for collectd. I wonder if Puppet can enroll servers in FreeIPA as well? Hmm…