5 years of metrics and monitoring

5 years ago, monitoring was just beginning to emerge from the dark ages.

Since then there's been a cambrian explosion of tools, a rough formalisation of how the tools should be strung together, the emergence of the monitoringsucks meme, the transformation of monitoringsucks into monitoringlove, and the rise of a sister community around Monitorama.

Alert fatigue has become a concept that's entered the devops consciousness, and more advanced shops along the monitoring continuum are analysing their alerting data to help humans and machines work better together.

But Nagios is still the dominant check executor. Plenty of sites still use RRDtool. And plenty of people are still chained to their pagers, with no relief in sight.

What's holding us back? What will the next 5 years look like? Will we still be using Nagios? Have we misjudged our audience? What are our biggest challenges?

Lindsay Holmwood is an engineering manager living in the Australian Blue Mountains. He runs a distributed infracoders team at Bulletproof that builds hassle free tools, and was responsible for ensuring 100% uptime for the 2010 + 2011 + 2012 Movember campaigns.

In his spare time, Lindsay organises the monthly Sydney DevOps Meetups. He also won third place at the 1996 Sydney Royal Easter Show LEGO building competition.