ZMON

ZMON is Zalando's open-source platform monitoring tool, used in production since early 2014. It supports our many engineering teams in observing their services and metrics on various layers, from CPU load to team KPIs.

Take a look at the slides from our recent talk at the DevOps Ireland meetup for background information on ZMON.

Here's an introduction on how we started the project.

Here's more detailed documentation than you'll find in this README.

Features / Working:

• Define checks as data sources executed on self-defined entities
• Define alerts on checks and entities, with thresholds, as it suits your team
• Define custom dashboards with widgets and alert filters based on teams and tags
• Check commands and Alert conditions are arbitrary Python expressions, giving you a lot of power
• Store all results, incl. flattened dicts in time series in KairosDB
• Offers internal charting and integrated Grafana for dashboards
• Entity service to push entities: hosts, databases, et al. We push EC2, ELB, etc. via zmon-aws-agent
• Define checks via YAML files and push using zmon-cli
• Use trial run in the UI to develop your checks/alerts with quick feedback
• Trigger instant evaluation from UI for checks on longer intervals to rerun commands

Start Demo Using Vagrant

Install a recent Vagrant version (at least 1.7.4) and simply do:

$ vagrant up

Please note that the provisioning process will take some time (~15min) while it downloads the Docker images.

Frontend

https://localhost:8443/

Login with your own GitHub credentials (OAuth redirect).

Grafana

https://localhost:8443/grafana/

You will be able to create/save dashboards.

KairosDB

KairosDB frontend, i.e. for manually query of metrics:

http://localhost:38083/

Issues

• If single containers do not start up ssh into the vagrant box and run the start.sh script again manually or use the start-services.sh script to restart single components. Later one takes parameters like controller or worker.

Install the Command Line Interface

Use PIP to install the zmon executable from PyPI.

$ pip3 install --upgrade zmon-cli

Use the ZMON CLI to push/create/update entities (hosts, databases, etc.), check definitions and create optional alerts (also possible via UI).

$ zmon entities push examples/entities/local-postgresql.yaml

$ zmon entities push examples/entities/local-scheduler-instance.json

Push your first check definition:

$ zmon check-definitions update examples/check-definitions/zmon-scheduler-rates.yaml

Modify the alert definition to point to the right check id before doing:

$ zmon alert-definitions update examples/alert-definitions/scheduler-rate-too-low.yaml

Build Environment

If you want to compile everything from source, you can do so with our separate "build-env" Vagrant box:

$ cd build-env
$ vagrant up

Thanks

Docker images/scripts used in slightly modified versions are:

• abh1nav/cassandra:latest
• wangdrew/kairosdb
• official Redis and PostgreSQL

Thanks to the original authors!

License

Copyright 2013-2015 Zalando SE

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.