On 20 July 2015 at 22:50, Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
If you control all those systems then this is easy, pushing it to the "cloud" (which is a load of bollocks in this scenario) you are adding further steps to something which has already existed for over 20 years and is well understood and a problem that is pretty much solved.
Surely I can't avoid the "cloud" in the broadest sense, if I want to get notifications to what is essentially a cloud device anyway (my phone).
Having control of the key systems is preferable (hence looking for self-hosted alternatives to IFTTT, which increases complexity beyond a sensible level unless I'm doing it for other reasons as well, which I am in this case).
The age-old monitoring systems I have looked at (such as Nagios, or the sort of tools you might use for graphing your CPU temperature) have been around long enough but they're not trivial to use (unless you already have the skills, which I don't).
It feels like a parallel argument might be that Gmail is overkill for email when all I need is a local Postfix and Mutt installation (where of-course the latter is actually far more hassle than the former). I'm sure that's not the argument you're making, but I'm not quite seeing what I'm missing. (There are dozens of reasons why Postfix+Mutt might be preferable of-course, but "overkill" isn't one of them.)
I guess what I'm asking is: if the cloud is the wrong way, what tools *should* I be using to do it differently. You mentioned nagios/munin before but I'm struggling to see how setting that up is going to be easier in the absence of prior experience with either. I haven't tried Nagios recently but I have tried hard with it on and off over the years in the hope of getting a basic server monitoring setup working without ever really getting something that delivered what I couldn't do in a few minutes using free (beer) cloud tools elsewhere. (This isn't about the freedom aspect, it''s about which is the most "stupidly complicated". The "freedom" aspect I'm already sold on.)
Mark