New Scout Gem Released replied by seebq @ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:02:32 -0000

seebq — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:02:32 -0000

Scout 2.0 has been released!

See our blog post for more details:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2008/06/09/ev…

Enjoy!

Interruption of Service 06/11/2008 replied by seebq @ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:01:00 -0000

seebq — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:01:00 -0000

Scout experienced problems collecting data and reporting from 2:30 – 9:30 PM EST (6:30 – 13:30 GMT). During this time, intermittent data was collected from Scout clients and the Scout web interface was not available.

The problem stems from an upgrade we are still working on to provide better resources for the virtualized Scout instances across the data centers. More specifically, we’re experiencing issues running virtualized 32-bit instances on 64-bit hosts. We are now running on much better hardware, and will continue to work towards improving the reliability and speed of the Scout service.

We care deeply about reliability and rely on Scout ourselves to monitor our own servers. While we do not have a Service Level Agreement (SLA), we want to compensate you if were negatively affected by the outage. Please contact us at support@highgroove.com and we’ll take care of it.

Interruption of Service 5/21/2008 replied by seebq @ Wed, 21 May 2008 19:26:33 -0000

seebq — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:26:33 -0000

We had a quick outage of one of the servers in the load balance pool for a few minutes today (around 3:10pm EST / 12:10pm PST lasting for about 10-15 minutes). Technically, the one server did not go down, but rather, became so overloaded that requests timed out. That means a portion of the requests, including reports, alerts, and errors from the client were sent to a server that was unable to respond. We apologize for any inconveniences.

If your client continues to run instead of closing down, due to a hung HTTP connection, please consider upgrading the scout client using:

sudo gem install scout

to get the latest version.

As always, we care deeply about reliability and rely on Scout ourselves to monitor our own servers. While we do not have a Service Level Agreement (SLA), we want to compensate you if were negatively affected by the outage. Please contact us at support@highgroove.com and we’ll take care of it.

Interruption of Service 5/11/2008 replied by seebq @ Sun, 11 May 2008 13:26:20 -0000

seebq — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:26:20 -0000

The issue has been resolved. Clients were unable to checkin, and data was unable to be collected for about one hour.

Interruption of Service 5/11/2008 replied by seebq @ Sun, 11 May 2008 13:07:36 -0000

seebq — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:07:36 -0000

On Sunday May 11 2008 at around 8:00 am EST (5:00 am PST), we had a minor issue with one of the mysql db masters. We are working to resolve the issue.

Interruption of Service 4/28/2008 replied by seebq @ Fri, 02 May 2008 22:45:30 -0000

seebq — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:45:30 -0000

Just a follow up—we now have a solution in place to ensure that if the server hosting the community plugins becomes unavailable, we can keep on chugging!

cron interval replied by seebq @ Fri, 02 May 2008 22:44:22 -0000

seebq — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:44:22 -0000

Randy, that’s an excellent suggestion. It will work now, but we may in the future decide not to accept report data on the time interval. Thanks!

Scout Performance Impact replied by seebq @ Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:00:23 -0000

seebq — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:00:23 -0000

Also, if you’re worried about CPU cycles being stolen by Scout, you can always run scout using nice to give it a low priority:

/usr/bin/nice -n 10 /usr/bin/scout

We’ve found the performance impact to be very very low, nonetheless.

Interruption of Service 4/28/2008 replied by seebq @ Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:56:19 -0000

seebq — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:56:19 -0000

Just to clarify—only one instance of the scout virtualized setup experienced problems and had to be rebooted. Only community plugins were affected by the downtime, which happens to be a majority of the plugins, and thus a majority of clients did not run plugins during this time. Clients were still checking in, thus monitoring still functioned. We are currently working on a solution to make sure this does not happen again.

Plugins WANTED! replied by seebq @ Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:27:12 -0000

seebq — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:27:12 -0000

Matt—

I haven’t checked out m|monit, but I actually do use monit to keep all the components running for Scout. Unfortunately though, getting an e-mail about a process ballooning in memory and then restarting doesn’t really help me diagnose why it did it in the first place, or what was going on at the time. I’m with you (and probably preaching to the choir about how Scout helps to alleviate this problem by showing you what other factors could have contributed to this), though!

And having a scout plugin that works in conjunction with monit is a fantastic idea. Brilliant, even.

I am testing a new plugin called, simply enough: Keep Process Running and it couldn’t be simpler. I think interrogating the monit file is an awesome idea too.

Keep ‘em coming! Thanks for the feedback!

SNORT plugin coming? replied by seebq @ Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:18:47 -0000

seebq — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:18:47 -0000

That is a most excellent suggestion. It seems like it would be very easy,—since Scout is simply Ruby, one could just parse the log file and grab what they wanted!

Check out our Rails Request plugin for details on how we implemented a simple log parser that reads the log from the end for a low memory footprint, and quick, detailed reads:

Rails Requests Plugin

WhatIsClientKey? replied by seebq @ Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:28:07 -0000

seebq — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:28:07 -0000

iceskysl -

In order to get a client key, you must have an account! You can technically still use Scout without an an account, but only to run individual plugins, using the -p option. If you want to enable them to automatically run, and actually use the report data (collect it on the server, to view trends, and see how data compares against multiple plugins), then you need an account.

Unfortunately, unless you’ve gotten in on one of the few pre-releases we’ve done, you can’t sign up for an account just yet. But, have no fears, we’re launching soon. Make sure to signup on our invite list. Also for more help and details on how the plugin architecture works, read here: How to Create a Plugin

Plugins WANTED! replied by seebq @ Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:42:29 -0000

seebq — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:42:29 -0000

Post your most wanted plugins here and we’ll help organize where development is happening!

Here are some of the plugins we’ve gotten requests for since launching:

Monitor Multiple URLS – a plugin that can take in a list of URLs and monitor each one, possibly reporting back data on each

Monitor a Single Mongrel – the mongrel monitor plugin right now takes in a directory like /etc/mongrel_cluster and checks every conf and yml file, for mongrel configurations—this plugin would monitor just a single .conf file for the mongrel

Any more? Comments wanted!

How Popular Are You? replied by seebq @ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:56:14 -0000

seebq — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:56:14 -0000

Derek did a great post using Scout’s Graphing features to show just how Popular he (well, we) are:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2008/01/14/ho…

Enjoy!

trouble running scout through cron replied by seebq @ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:54:12 -0000

seebq — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:54:12 -0000

If you’re having trouble running Scout through cron, be sure to check our help section here:

http://scoutapp.com/help

Here are some more tips.

Try Running Scout using the verbose, debug mode

Try running scout manually first using:

scout [client-key] -v -l debug

Check your crontab’s path

Check to make sure your crontab’s path includes the path to any program you’re calling (i.e. /usr/local/bin if your mongrel_rails is in /usr/local/bin).

You can set this using the PATH variable.

Tell cron to email you output

Setup your email in the crontab file using MAILTO variable and run the scout client using the verbose debugging mode as mentioned above.

Also, come visit us in the support chat room for more help:

http://scoutapp.campfirenow.com/bc177

Scout Launch replied by seebq @ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:39:29 -0000

seebq — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:39:29 -0000

Scout, our super-easy monitoring and reporting application, has been poked, prodded, and cleared for an initial launch.

If you haven’t already signed up for our launch list, do it now:

http://scoutapp.com/

We’re going to be allowing the first 100 signups tomorrow (Tuesday, March 18, 2008).

We think you’ll find Scout more than worth the wait,

—
Charles Brian Quinn
Highgroove Studios

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