PuppetConf 2014

This last Tuesday (the 23rd) I took the opportunity to listen in on PuppetConf via live web stream. In particular I listened in on the segment on Sensu which was presented by Tomas Duran, a Yelp employee. During this segment Tomas went over the challenges of monitoring, and how Yelp needed to evolve their own system monitoring in order to meet business needs. He laid out how monitoring stereotypically works in today's work environments and then broke into what Sensu is and how it helps break these stereotypes. The part that I focused in the most was how Yelp is using Sensu. They do not use all the components of Sensu, and have tried to simplify the workflow by only having *standalone checks run on all their clients. This helps reduce complexity when using configuration management tools such as Puppet, and also tightens security. Tomas also talked about using custom variables within checks that handlers would use for notification and escalation using tools such as Pagerduty and Atlassian's JIRA. Also during this segment Tomas presented how Yelp uses a custom 'monitoring_check' puppet module to build and manage all service checks on their nodes, which has become a research point within my project. I would like to utilize their monitoring check module, or something similar in order to make service management easier across all nodes like Tomas presented. 

* A standalone check is like a normal check, but instead of the server pushing a request to the client and running the check, the client runs the check locally and the publishes the response up to the server.