Ask HN: How do you monitor multiple cloud infrastructure services?

3 points by tsestrich 9 years ago | 2 comments

Our startup is getting ready to launch, and I'm looking for an "easy" way to monitor our usage of the various cloud services that our product is built on. Specifically, I'd ideally like to monitor:

- Heroku performance and system usage

- Heroku logs (optional I suppose)

- SendGrid email usage (how have been sent)

- AWS S3 stats, particularly storage size

- Maybe errors from NewRelic

- Our own internal DB data (signups, etc)

- Etc.

I've looked, and couldn't come up with anything that would let me aggregate these into a single view. My default would be to do something like just opening a bunch of browser windows, or building a plain HTML page with a bunch of iFrames.

I realize constant real-time info might not be necessary all the time, but I'm thinking of like a monitor that just has this up in the background.

What do you all use?

rpeden 9 years ago |

I haven't used it personally, but I know a couple of people who have had some success using Stackdriver: https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/

For the individual services, there are monitoring tools like S3Stat[1], created by HN user jasonkester. It does a great job and is affordable, but I realize that individual tools like this don't necessarily help with aggregating everything into a single view.

I've been thinking about creating a desktop app that helps with this. When I'm already paying monthly for a bunch of services, I often want to avoid a bunch of extra monthly fees for monitoring them all. The way I envision it, the app would come with plugins for monitoring common services, and make it easy to create new plugins for monitoring any cloud or local service you might have. Do you think something like this would be useful, or just overkill for most people?

[1] https://www.s3stat.com/home.aspx

tsestrich 9 years ago | |

What you described actually sounds really useful, but probably not for the hobbyist. For people with just hobby projects, yeah, it's probably overkill.

I definitely agree, though. My intent is to monitor for if/when we get close to entering a new billing tier, see any obvious abnormalities in usage, etc. Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check them out!