OpsDash began as a quest for a simple monitoring solution that could fulfill a few reasonable requirements. Though there are lots of monitoring solutions out there, none readily meets today’s needs: to monitor both servers and services, to easily handle aggregation across clusters, and to provide intelligent dashboards with sensible alerting.

Existing open-source solutions are cumbersome. Some solve parts of the problem – others don’t even do that well. Many have UIs that seem left-over from the 90s. Not that that’s bad, mind you, but interactive graphs and rich tooltips are helpful.

Then there are the SaaS products. The UIs are much better, with #monitoringlove and what not, but core elements are still missing. Monitoring MySQL servers, for example, hasn’t gotten any easier. With available SaaS solutions, you still need to install agents as well as dependencies for MySQL clients and plugins, and then create a dashboard from raw metrics - and repeat the process for each MySQL server!

And so, RapidLoop was started, and OpsDash created, to provide a truly outstanding solution for today’s monitoring needs. OpsDash:

• Is so lean and mean it can run on a Raspberry Pi. The server mind you, not just the agent!
• Can query your AWS tags, figure out your cluster topology, and give you a smartly pre-configured dashboard per cluster.
• Allows you to set up a MySQL dashboard just by inputting the hostname+creds into a screen. Nothing else required, really!
• Will not send you 43 email alerts in 5 minutes and still leave you wondering what the current situation is. Sensible alerts only!

Watch out for upcoming blog posts to find out more about how OpsDash can help you take monitoring to a new level.