Echelon

Echelon is a system comprised of multiple loosely couple coupled components designed for scalable monitoring and metrics.

Echelon allows customizable alerting, metrics collection, and dashboard generation.

It was originally discussed at ChefConf 2012. Video and slides of this presentation are available:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXxtdE-Paco
• http://gestalt-informant.heroku.com/

vagrant support

While a monitoring system is obviously most effective with more than a single system, you can use ‘vagrant up’ to launch a virtualbox instance based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 12.04 amd64 to experiment with Echelon.

chef cookbooks

Echelon uses Chef search in several ares to integrate components. This will not be available when using vagrant and chef-solo to experiment. Besides various cookbook dependencies, the following Chef cookbooks are used:

sensu

Sensu ( https://github.com/sensu ) is used for monitoring and alerting. The sensu cookbook used is the official chef cookbook found at https://github.com/sensu/sensu-chef with minor modifications to deliver the sensu-stdin-metrics client used for sending metrics to graphite via the local sensu socket.

collectd and collectd_plugins

Collectd is used for simple system statistics collection. These cookbooks setup the core of collectd and plugins used for gathering system data and writing to graphite.

graphite

Graphite is the metrics collection system used and allows flexible, intelligent metrics gathering. http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

gdash

Gdash is a lightweight graphite frontend based on the twitter bootstrap ( https://github.com/ripienaar/gdash ). This cookbook configures gdash and provides Chef resource that can be used for building custom dashboards.