Readers of this little blog may know I’ve spent some time to have a munin setup that was tweaked to be optimized. But I’ve reached a point where my knowledge did not suffice to balance the design problems of munin. This is not a rant, I just say that when your infrastructure reaches a certain size munin reaches its limits. The pull based model, the graph generation (don’t tell me about the CGI graph, this thing never worked as expected) overloaded my management box. Talking with other peoples brought collectd to my attention so I gave it a try.

Some friends told me for a while about collectd, why I should look at it, why munin is so painful and so on. If you’ve been reading my posts you know I have tweaked a little my $WORK munin install to make it faster and lighter. But I finally took time to explore collectd, and I regret to not have done this before. It has so many pros that I decided to implement it in parallel with munin (because I can’t afford being blind on metrics). But collectd comes without an UI : it “only” collectds data, but that’s not a problem. There are various web interfaces and after giving a look to a bunch of them I fell in love with Lindsay Holmwood‘s Visage.