Rolf

'Azamat is run Big Data analytics on famous last words in devops. Most common is "I know, I roll own monitoring tool!"' -- @DEVOPS_BORAT

Overview

• Monitoring and graphing tool like Munin or collectd.
• Written in Erlang.
• Sample frequency down to 1 second, configured per plug-in.
• Record data on multiple nodes in parallel.
• Asynchronous data gathering.
• HTTP interface for HTML, graphs and data via JSON.
• Writing plug-ins is simple. Plug-ins are kept resident between updates, as in collectd.
• Runs anywhere Erlang runs (at least Linux, OS X, Windows).

Getting started

Configure which node(s) should be recorders in etc/app.config.

[{rolf, [recorders, [rolf@john]]}].

Configure which services should run on which nodes in etc/services.config.

{node, rolf@john, [disk, loadtime]}.
{node, rolf@paul, [disk]}.
{node, rolf@george, [disk]}.
{node, rolf@ringo, [disk]}.

Start Rolf on each machine.

[user@john ~] rolf start
[user@paul ~] rolf start
[user@george ~] rolf start
[user@ringo ~] rolf start

Architecture

• An Erlang cluster is created. Each node runs the rolf application.
• One node is designated the recorder by it's config file.
• If the cluster has no recorder, nothing happens.
• If a recorder has been started, service configuration is distributed to all other nodes by the recorder.
• A node manager process starts services and they start emitting samples.
• Services can be implemented as Erlang functions, external commands or external daemons.
• Services collect samples and send them to all live recorders.
• Recorders and collectors can be added and removed from the cluster dynamically.

The supervision tree of an Rolf node looks like this (node has recorder):

rolf_sup
├── rolf_recorder
│   └── errd_server
└── rolf_collector_sup
    ├── rolf_service (svc1)
    └── rolf_service (svc2)
        └── rolf_external

Plugins

Plugins add additional collectors to Rolf.

• Plugins live in plugins.
• A plugin has a config file, see plugins/loadtime/loadtime.config for an example.
• Plugin config can be overridden per-site by customising services.config.
• Plugins can use an Erlang module, a command or a daemon to collect data.
• Plugin collectors written in Erlang should implement the rolf_collector behaviour.
• The collect/1 function should capture data. The argument, Service, is a service record, which includes lots of useful info such as name and options (see apps/rolf/include/rolf.hrl for more info).

Author

Ben Godfrey, ben@ben2.com, http://aftnn.org/.

License

Rolf - a monitoring and graphing tool like Munin or collectd.

Copyright (C) 2011 Ben Godfrey.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.