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What software does everyone use to monitor hardware? I know about nagios and cacti, but does anyone use any other software?
http://www.zabbix.com/ is fairly good too - comparable to Nagios and Cacti at least.
OpenNMS is quite good, if you have a large number of servers and need to do very comprehensive monitoring.
SolarWinds IPMonitor is pretty useful. A bit like cacti or nagios, but more pleasing to the eye. Windows only, and not free (not even as in "free beer"), though. ;-)
For server monitoring without needing to install any software on your server take a look at my company ServerMonitoringHQ.com Server Monitoring
To monitor the hardware of HP Proliant Servers and HP Blade centers i can recommend Nagios (or Shinken if you want to be avant-garde) together with the plugin check_hpasm.
I have used both mon and munin. I like munin because of its simplicity and flexibility.
My company just started using Nagios mainly to keep track of uptime. What are its difficients that you would look for another solution ? Is it scale or lack of monitoring capability ?
Consider using a service like Alertra (alertra.com) if you don't want to run the monitoring server yourself. We have been using this for about a year and have been very pleased with it.
We use Zenoss for monitoring our systems. We found it a lot easier to work with then OpenNMS.
We use NAGIOS for everything, and god on a lower level/within a rails application.
I'd be glad to give you more details if you gave us more details about what specifically you're looking for or trying to accomplish.
You could use RHQ (http://rhq-project.org/ ). While it is not too strong on the hardware side, it provides support for many services. Graphing and alerting are available out of the box and suppor for new/other kinds of managed resources can be provided via plugins.
RHQ is open source and has just recently released version 4.0 with a nice new GUI. RHQ also offers a command line interface hat allows scripting.
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I'm considering using Node.js with a framework such as express, meteor, or sails (a directory with social features such as sharing, messaging and uploading media). I don't have any features planned that explicitly require real-time functionality, so does it make sense to use Node.js anyway instead of Rails?
There's so much buzz around Node.js that I am tempted to use it just so that I don't get left behind.
As DHH wisely noticed regarding Node vs Rails, "everything can be used instead of everything else". That's somewhat true in a sense that, for example, a site in Rails with promptly set up caching can be as fast as one written in Node.js.
Besides, Node is not necessarily about real-time. It's more about being able to handle many light (in terms of processing time needed) requests. If you expect high level of concurrency (I mean, really, expect, not just are dreaming of it) and every request is supposed to be relatively small, then you could consider using Node, just because handling bigger load (up to some point) will require less work with Node.
Bottom line, use what you are good at. Unless you want to try something new. And Node.js is definitely worth trying.
You're question does lack quite a bit of context.
This question all depends on the context.
If this is contract work or something you want to make money with in the near future and you're not sufficiently skilled with any of the mentioned nodejs frameworks.
Then I would recommend you use whatever you're already good at.
If this is a private project for fun or any other non serious purpose.
Then I would seriously recommend you to try one of mentioned nodejs frameworks.
In my opinion nodejs is currently the cutting edge web technology. As a developer
you should always try to stay on the cutting edge. That way when you learn how nodejs can be used you might find ways to use those things in your professional environment.
I've lately been using meteor a lot and I can highly recommend it, once you get the hang of it you can do truly amazing things that you could never even imagine doing(in a reasonable timespan) in a classic php project.
Also according to some meteor will replace RoR alltogether blog
Aside from real-time, main plus I've seen is having same team being able to develop JavaScript client code and server side code for UI web applications. "Code sharing" between client and server seems a pipe dream to me, but same language is really nice.
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Looking for some suggestions from the community for development stacks for collaborative environments. Could you share what you have and what has worked for you or your team?
The following is probably too verbose for some and an expression of just some rambling thoughts I've had about my particular scenario as I'm working with a hatchling dev group. SO, if you read it 1UP for you, otherwise, please just feel free to just share your thoughts re: the first question and what's worked for your team.
I have a situation where myself and a couple other developers are working together and I'd like to set up the "best" dev environment possible for Ruby on Rails development. At the moment I use git and some of the usually accepted best practices for development, however the other guys are new and not terribly familiar with the shell, git, etc. They're more from a php and monolithic environment.
I do have a central linux server that has been used hitherto for LAMP based dev for them. I can retool it to anything I'd like it to be as I'm quite adept and experienced at Unix system and network admin.
Could someone please suggest what may work well in this scenario? Again, ultimately we need to do collaborative development that has the lowest learning curve. I'll be the only one deploying to Heroku until I feel comfortable with their experience.
I would like to put something together that can get us all up to speed quickly in a matter of a day vs a longer learning curve and then allow them to grow into the shell and so forth over the next couple weeks.
What I was thinking was more of a shared SMB (mixed Windows and Mac workstations) and SFTP unified projects folder that has either apache virtual hosts for each project or thin rack. I'd continue to use my methods, but this could provide the flexibility for them to grow into this and be able to restart httpd or thin as per need.
Am I on the proverbial right track or has someone seen a better alternative? A lot of things have crossed my mind such as Gitorious (since we'll have a lot of small projects needing to be tracked and an enormous GitHub account is not feasible), Heroku, OpenShift and a lot of other things, but I have enough uncertainty that I'd like to get some input from the community as to the right mix for great collaborative agile development.
I have an answer but I think you have conflicting requirements: i.e. lowest learning curve vs low/free cost.
You say that GitHub is not feasible but it does offer unparalleled features for novice users. They can see commits on a website instead of on the commandline, can even edit files right in the browser (since yesterday, uses Ace) and gain insight into the branching/merging process.
Another paid option is http://cloud9ide.com/ which is also web-based.
I use my own development server as well but only use it for experienced people who need no hand-holding. If I were to let everyone on there the amount of support would consume my entire day.
It is my opinion that doing Rails development people should adopt the best practices in the field. See it like this: at least you won't burden them with learning Subversion or --eek-- CVS. Just seeing the commits on GitHub and having a discussion right after puzzling pieces of code is worth the money.
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My company is looking to move their software to an open source framework. Their first thought was J2EE. I know that Django and Rails are popular for recreational development, but not sure about them in a corporate setting.
I was looking to compile a list of possible web frameworks to consider. Unfortunately I am not able to release our requirements to the public. Also I would like to know if you have seen/used different frameworks in a corporate environment.
Thanks
I believe the more important question is what talents you got. If you have a primarily Java team, and you want to completely move to Ruby or Python, it's gonna be hard, if not impossible.
When deciding if X language/framework is good for a business, you have to consider opinions from your internal technical staff first. That normally sets you in a place with limited choices. Unless you are with a very small but highly talented/motivated team or planning to build a team with new hires.
Not sure what you mean by a corporate use, but we're using Django at a large media company for the websites of nearly 40 radio stations.
Another vote for Django. I'm not sure if the Washington Post or LA Times count as "corporate" but they have a lot more demands (both daily hits and time-to-new-feature) than your average "corporate" environment.
Struts, Stripes, Wicket, Spring MVC. I use Grails and love it.
You can go to Rails too. We use Rails successfully in a number of serious applications.
If you are just looking to save money from software, you can go to any J2EE frameworks out there. If you looking for some fun and rapid development, try Rails.
It all depends on the type of the project and the talent you have.
I use django in a real-time professional environment.
it's solid, and blazing fast (django on nginx/fastcgi, and soon couchdb too!)
We're using sinatra (ruby) for frontend to our main internal application. Simple, stable and flexible.
Struts2, Spring MVC, Stripes, Wicket, Grails, JSF, Seam, GWT, Flex, etc (Stripes and Grails being my favorite).
Matt Raible did interesting comparisons of (most of) them in this presentation which is an updated version of this old one.
Another interesting reading might be the What is the most commonly used Java web framework? question here on SO.
IMO, whatever you choose doesn't matter that much, the presentation layer will still be throw away code.
Any framework that keeps you away from the imperative languages (e.g. Java, C#, JSP with Java etc.) is better. Declarative/Functional/Data Flow languages (e.g. Ruby, XSLT, Python, etc.) result in solid implementations that save you support/enhancement $$$.
It sounds like the powers that be are comfortable with Java, but do yourself a favor and avoid J2EE. Go grab Restlet and Groovy, write a nice Rest back-end that not only serves as a programmatic API for your project, but will work nicely with any Ajax/Javascript library you choose to implement a UI in.
We are currently using Django and the web site is driving a lot of business to the company as well as growing by double digits since last year. It doesn't matter what kind of technology the corporation is using but what their business model is. What are you currently using in-house? It will make more sense to use a web framework related to your in-house code, knowledge and man power.
If nobody knows Rails or Django, you have to factor in the learning curve during the migration. It should only be a couple of weeks depending on the savviness of your developers. Then again if everyone hates or do not enjoy working with the in-house technology, trying a new one might be worth it.
"I know that Django and Rails are popular for recreational development (...)"
Rails:
http://basecamphq.com
http://highrisehq.com
Django:
http://www.lawrence.com/
http://www.everyblock.com/
They have high traffic and content-heavy services. I wouldn't call those guys business as "recreational development".
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I have an Access 2000 program handling the receiving of goods in the company.
I need to Export Inventory Items and Quantities to Quickbook (enterprise 2007?). I have a good handle on the Access program, but know nothing about quickbooks.
Can this be done? What would I need for it?
Look into the QuickBooks SDK, a free download from Intuit. It provides a COM object interface or XML interface to all of the QuickBooks data. Additionally, if you need to do this over a WAN, you can use the QuickBooks Web Connector to talk to QuickBooks asynchronously over a WAN.
QuickBooks integration is not a trivial thing to accomplish. There are many gotchas. Your best friend will be the Intuit Developer Network forums.
You do not want to use QIF, QFX, or IIF exports. They are deprecated formats which can cause data corruption. Additional information about various methods of integrating with QuickBooks can be found on this integration wiki page and on this QuickBooks integration wiki.
Take a look at the QuickBooks SDK. If you want something simpler to work with, QODBC (with the write capabilities), while not free, will probably be simpler to work with for Access.
Google is your friend here. Quickbooks has some primitive import capabilities, but there are a number of small products that do what you need. This guy seems to have some pretty good stuff. Essentially there are a couple of different text formats (QIF and OFX if memory serves) that are used for Quickbooks import, the problem with them is they don't do much error checking. There is also a Quickbooks SDK which allows you to make calls using COM (yum) to import, and that does full error checking (it actually calls into a running version of Quickbooks), but is probably overkill for what you want.
Take a look at Quickbooks SDK and Documentation. The SDK has two COM interface: QBFC and QBXML. The difference in using QBXML, you need to serialize and deserialize XML manually which isn't hard once you get the handle of it. And I find QBXML much more convenient since you can choose to include requests and responses you need.
Also, if you plan to use Quickbooks SDK, the Online Reference is your best friend.
+1 to Yishai. I've been using qodbc for about 10 years now and 4 or 5 different versions of quickbooks. qodbc utilizes a database-like syntax to interact with the company file.
UNLIKE any form of proper database interaction, do as little work as possible in your query itself, as the qodbc driver can take 10 seconds to 2 minutes to handle a dozen records from a table of roughly 1000 records. A process that can import 15 orders with 5 lines each means talking to customer, item, invoiceline, invoice tables and can take 5 minutes. Sadly, I often am reduced to building a MySql database based on mass exports while I sort out and understand the data. THEN I go back and try to make queries directly.
While being an ODBC data connection in windows is great, learn to distrust each link in your toolchain and figure out how to troubleshoot problems to prove aspects positively correct as well as positively wrong. My most recent problem was with QB11 on Win7 x64 computer. The php stack at the time was suspect and was causing errors. And please always try to perform error checking, which is somewhat painful in that environment, but becomes crucial when "something breaks later".
This very minute I'm researching the php stack for win7 to see if I can again trust it for use with qodbc and order importing. (exporting from magento)
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I've been tasked with writing a monitoring program for my company's server software that integrates with zenoss via snmp.
To be brief, I can't get anything up off the ground. I think my first goal is to figure out the correct way to write an snmp agent (in any language to start, although it will eventually be in java). Are there any good test harnesses out there? I've used snmptest, which ships with zenoss, but it's not much good to me if I can't get a test agent off the ground. Anything that I know the zenoss manual has a lot of info, but it seems to presume a prior knowledge of standard systems monitoring practices and tools, and I can barely penetrate it.
Also, is it generally a good practice to use snmp to monitor software?
Short description of a typical SNMP agent:
Set the agent up. This usually entails telling it what server to send alerts to.
Run it.
Send appropriate SNMP messages to the configured server when things happen.
Reply to requests from the configured server.
All of the request/reply stuff is done using SNMP messages. If your company does not have a specially designed/assigned OID for the server software, you'll need to look into the standard MIB definitions to determine which OID(s) are appropriate.
MIB: Management Information Block. These come in standard and custom flavors. Standard ones are defined by a standards body (IETF?). Custom ones are created by vendors to support information unique to their product(s). MIBs are basically collections of OIDs.
OID: Object IDentifier - this is a dotted-notation number string that identifies the piece of hardware/software, and the bit of information you're looking for from it - for example, the number of TX collisions on an ethernet port might look something like: 1.5.82.316.8.4.3 (though that's not a valid OID, it's just a made-up example).
More detail available at Wikipedia. Download a free MIB browser to get an idea of what OIDs look like, and how detailed they can get. Check the RFCs for more detailed information. Look at something like perl's Net-SNMP - you may even be able to use the snmpd software that's included with it to do most of your work.
SNMP is certainly an acceptable way to monitor your network, devices and servers. Because it uses UDP it won't unduly stress the network via TCP retries and the like (SNMP clients are, or should be, architected to handle dropped packets etc.). Plus you'll have a huge array of client solutions to monitor your system and integrate against.
If you envisage a final solution in Java, see the Java/SNMP documentation and SNMP4J
SNMP.com (founded by Jeffrey Case, one of the SNMP architects) sells extensible SNMP agents. One of these may save you a world of grief.
nSoftware has an SNMP agent (not free). This might be easier than rolling your own.
Also check out William Stalling's book: SNMP.
Zenoss is quite complicated and comes with many pre-defined SNMP stuff. Do you really need to code your own SNMP agents?
SNMP is a big topic, with lots of complexity if you go into all the details and all the historical versions of the protocol and related tools. I'd suggest picking up a copy of Essential SNMP by Mauro and Schmidt, which gives a very clear introduction to both the fundamental ideas behind SNMP as well as practical examples of how to get started with it and use it in parctice with a number of different tools.
you can aim lower and try the Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/).
I too tried the Zenoss but gave up. The Cacti was up and running pretty fast. I just monitor use of bandwith of quite a few routers and many many ports in switches all over the country. But there are templates for monitoring all kind of things more related to a single server (temp, fan speed etc.)
BR. Anders