Episode 15: Nagios was the Original Call of Duty

Let’s chat about the Cloud and everything in between. The people in this world are pretty comfortable with not running physical servers on their own, but trusting someone else to run them. Yet, people suffer from the psychological barrier of thinking they need to build, design, and run their own monitoring system. Fortunately, more companies are turning to Datadog.

Today, we’re talking to Ilan Rabinovitch, Datadog’s vice president of product and community. He spends his days diving into container monitoring metrics, collaborating with Datadog’s open source community, and evangelizing observability best practices. Previously, Ilan led infrastructure and reliability engineering teams at various organizations, including Ooyala and Edmunds.com. He’s active in the open source and DevOps communities, where he is a co-organizer of events, such as SCALE and Texas Linux Fest.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Datadog is well-known, especially because it is a frequent sponsor
• More organizations know their core competency is not monitoring or managing servers
• Monitoring/metrics is a big data problem; Datadog takes monitoring off your plate
• Alternate ways, other than using Nagios, to monitor instances and regenerate configurations
• Datadog is first to identify patterns when there is a widespread underlying infrastructure issue
• Trends of moving from on-premise to Cloud; serverless is on the horizon
• How trends affect evolution of Datadog; adjusting tools to monitor customers’ environments
• Datadog’s scope is enormous; the company tries to present relevant information as the scale of what it’s watching continues to grow
• Datadog’s pricing is straightforward and simple to understand; how much Cloud providers charge to use Datadog is less clear
• Single Pane of Glass: Too much data to gather in small areas (dashboards)  
• Why didn’t monitoring catch this? Alerts need to be actionable and relevant
• How to use Datadog’s workflow for setting alerts and work metrics
• Datadog’s first Dash user conference will be held in July in New York; addresses how to solve real business problems, how to scale/speed up your organization

Links:

• Ilan Rabinovitch on Twitter
• Datadog
• Docker Adoption Survey Results  
• Rubric for Setting Alerts/Work Metrics
• Dash Conference
• re:Invent
• Nagios