Back it up Oh man, did I get ahead of myself in my last post. I started chatting tools, and I realize now that I really should have been talking more about why I’m using Sensu and Gremlin. But it didn’t occur to me until this past week at Monitorama. John Allspaw gave the keynote talk (Taking Human Performance Seriously) this year. While you can watch the talk here, I’ll highlight a few points here:
One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We’d routinely generate alerts that weren’t actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn’t trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It’s safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.
I’ve been messing around with compiling Sensu Go for several different platforms lately. In my last post, I got Sensu Go agents running on my Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetson Nanos. I wanted to see if I could get an agent running on OS X as well, because who doesn’t want to monitor their laptop! The Setup Similar to what I did previously (and subsequently learned a ton more about), we’ll need to compile the Sensu Go packages since they’re not currently packaged for OS X.
UPDATES When I originally wrote this post, I was operating under some outdated assumptions when it comes to building Sensu on arm devices. I’ll post the updates here at the beginning of the article, and you can read on to see how I’d previously set up Sensu on my Nvidia Jetson Nanos. Compiling Sensu Go As a Go novice, I didn’t fully understand the workflow for compiling Sensu for arm devices.
This past week, I had the pleaseure of attending Dockercon. While I was there primarily working the Sensu booth, it occurred to me that Docker presents an ideal way to demo what Sensu does, and I can quickly get an environment up without having to go through the rigmarole that I previously did using Vagrant. Now, that’s not saying that I think one tool is better than the other, but for the purposes of quick demos, Docker is more useful to me.
Back in August, I took a Customer Success role at Sensu. I’d been familiar with Sensu through my various bits of tinkering and dabbling with monitoring in the past, and was happy to take the role and work with the Sensu team officially. Now that I’ve been working with Sensu for a few months (and am officially on paternity leave for the next several weeks), I decided it was time to revisit the idea of using Sensu to monitor my Kegpi’s various sensors.