Monitoring Taxonomy

Chapter 1. Welcome! Read This First

There are few things you need to know before we begin.

First, what you’re holding in your hand is not the entire report. This print version only includes the 25 open source tools from the full taxonomy. Think of it as the teaser. The rest (62 tools in all) are online at http://github.com/librato/taxonomy.

Second, this report was not intended to be read cover-to-cover. This is a reference work. What I’m trying to do here is categorize your problem and then provide you some descriptions of monitoring tools that might help you solve your problem. I’m not trying to fully document every monitoring tool, I’m just trying to get you pointed in the right direction. See the following section for a description of how we’re going to do that.

Third, I didn’t choose the tools that were included in this report. They are self-selected based on their use in the real world by other engineers like you. See “How Did You Choose the Tools?” if you’re curious about why tool X was included but not tool Y.

How Does This Report Work?

This report is predicated on the assumption that you hold in your mind a loose set of requirements (or at least desires) for a monitoring system. Maybe you need an open source tool that can inspect SFlow traffic and alert you to a bit-torrent happening on your network, or maybe you need a commercial byte-code injection tool that can measure latency between your worker threads and your Kafka queue.

Maybe you don’t know exactly what you’re ...