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I am looking for an event monitoring dashboard with the ability to display arbitrary data. For example, Graphite/Carbon lets you push any kind of metrics and builds composable dashboards out of those graphs. Is there anything similar for event monitoring which can display arbitrary textual data? I've looked at log.io but it does not seem to support arbitrary events. Most of the data that I would be dealing with would be events from disparate systems, and not in the form of log files. The simplicity of Carbon is what I am looking for. Any suggestions?

Edit: To clarify, I already have graphical monitoring solutions in place. What I am looking for here is to display textual data like continuous status updates of, say, a deployment process.

;tldr - Any arbitrary event (textual, not graphical data) displaying dashboards out there which have easy to use clients to push data like Carbon/Graphite ?

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Thanks for the edit. Could you provide some examples? Are there products out there which do some of what you want, but not all? – Stefan Lasiewski Jul 11 '11 at 16:05
@Stefan Lasiewski: No, I have not come across any. I suspect there might be some, especially internal tools that companies with large infrastructural setups might be using. It will take some effort to build it myself, so I'm looking for already available, preferably open source, solutions. – talonx Jul 11 '11 at 16:41
From what I read, it seems like Splunk would fit your needs. But I'm assuming you considered Splunk, and it didn't fit your needs. So now I'm wondering what solution could help you with this. I worked with Graphite/Carbon a little bit, and have even thought about ways to integrate it with Syslog. But Graphite is a long way from displaying arbitrary textual data. – Stefan Lasiewski Jul 11 '11 at 17:40

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

So it's kind of old school, but have you considered SNMP ? There's clients galore that can send traps which can contain arbitrary text [as well as a fairly rich set of data types]. Now on the server side, I think there should be a few open source implementations out there. Is a Java based solution acceptable ?

Here's a list of some free and commercial SNMP tools.

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I already have a couple of such snmp scripts running, but they are for Cacti graphs. I can use SNMP for my present case, but I still need a dashboard that can show these events (as text). Thanks for the link - I'm yet to go through it. Java is acceptable. Do any of them have a dashboard (on the server side)? – talonx Jul 10 '11 at 2:52
up vote 1 down vote

Would Splunk fit your needs on this?

I know some developers who use it to get quasi-realtime information on the output of their code.

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I'm not too sure... but to my understanding of the requirement, RRDTool shall be a useful option to look upon. You can have try out Cacti {or CactiEZ distro itself for ease}, to check out how they make use of RRDTool for data collection and graphing tasks.

RRDTool is an OpenSource standard for high-performance data logging and statistical graphing of the that collected data.

Several OpenSource & Proprietry Monitoring solutions use it.

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I am not looking for graphing tools. – talonx Jul 9 '11 at 11:03
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I use zenoss to monitor, report, and graph on all my systems, both with SNMP, and via scripts I have written. I know it can send text alerts, emails, and can also be queried via a JSON or REST interface to do pretty much anything you want with reporting. I am not sure why you would want a dashboard that uses text and not graphics, as its faster for your brain to processes it. However, You might try to clarify what you are trying to do to get some better answers to your questions.

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Thanks Brian. Updated the question. – talonx Jul 11 '11 at 15:42

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