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Use Flapjack as bridge between Ops and Dev, and bridge from Nagios towards more freedom

Abstract

Flapjack is an alert umbrella for people that intelligently routes and rolls up alerts, integrates with check execution engines like Sensu & Nagios, and ships a well documented API for restart-less configuration.

There are two problems in monitoring:

• check configuration
• notification rules
• and a well known third one: check execution

I would considder the configuring checks part more or less solved in times of automated setups via Puppet or Chef.

Still there is the problem with notifications. Nobody wants to get flooded with alerts and often the alerts that reach people are just poorly chosen. Sometimes even the wrong people are chosen. Ops are getting alerts that are only useful for devs and vice versa. I've observed that Devs and Ops are suffering from a lag of influence on those notification rules configuration.

This hands on will give you an option to tackle this problem with the help of flapjack and move away from Nagios to whatever you like more at the same time.

SESSION REQUIREMENTS AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR ATTENDEES

You will get the most out of the tutorial if you’ve got Flapjack running locally on your laptop beforehand. The simplest way to do this is to install flapjack as per the Quickstart, which involves installing VirtualBox and Vagrant, cloning vagrant-flapjack and running vagrant up within it.

There’s a bit to download with that, so it’s best to do this in your own time before the conference.

You don’t need to have done the rest of the quickstart, though it can’t hurt. The main thing is to have Flapjack running locally and to have Icinga or Nagios sending it check execution results. This is all taken care of by the vagrant up within vagrant-flapjack.

This information is also available on the Flapjack website, please visit it again in the days leading up to the tutorial in case we’ve added anything else.

Links:

• Attendee Preparation – http://flapjack.io/docs/1.0/usage/Tutorial
• Flapjack Quickstart – http://flapjack.io/docs/1.0/usage/quickstart
• VirtualBox – https://www.virtualbox.org
• Vagrant – http://www.vagrantup.com
• Vagrant-flapjack – https://github.com/flapjack/vagrant-flapjack

Speaker

Birger Schmidt, Bulletproof

Birger Schmidt graduated at the Rostock University and the Humboldt University of Berlin in computer science. Since the beginning of the 90s he has been dealing with IT infrastructure, operations and development. From 2008 to 2012 he was senior consultant/trainer for Nagios/Icinga, Puppet and RT/OTRS at NETWAYS (netways.de/en). Since 2012 he works for Bulletproof (bulletproof.net) in Sydney and is in charge of the infrastructure behind Movember (movember.com).