So a colleague got this made. I wasn’t sure how to react initially but it’s rather grown on me.

We use Cloudkick to provide some backup monitoring for us (we use Nagios internally sigh). I noticed a while back that they had an API and made a note to create a Cloudkick module and write some Puppet integration with their API. That was sometime ago. Last week I finally got around to hammering something out and after some fighting with the Cloudkick API I’ve written up a module that handles agent installation and node creation (via the API).

I read a lot of “Product Comparison” blog posts, a consequence of working in a software firm. Most of them are really not very good. So what’s wrong with many of these posts? Well generally the bad posts aren’t product comparisons at all. Rather they document someone’s experiences with trying to find a solution to suit a specific organisation or set of needs. This is sometimes interesting and sometimes useful. But interesting only as a subjective point analysis.

So some time after everyone else played it I decided to give World of the Warcraft a try. This led to a number of declarations from Ruth and others that I would become an addict and my life over before I reached 40. Visions of me in WoW rehab sprang to mind. Well it hasn’t turned out quite like that. I really, really wanted to like World of Warcraft. Really I did.

A while back John Vincent spawned the hashtag #monitoringsucks. Oh and does it. Nagios is still state of the art in the monitoring world. And damn that’s depressing. So since #monitoringsucks appeared I’ve been hoping that some people who take heart and start writing modular, scalable, and extensible monitoring components and tools. The team at Sonian have kicked off things with the introduction of Sensu. Sensu is a new cloud monitoring framework with a Message Bus-based model.