Zombie pancakes: rebooting Flapjack - Lindsay Holmwood

Flapjack made a splash in the monitoring world circa 2010 as an alternative to Nagios, but without consistent development it soon went dormant.

In 2012 the Flapjack project was rebooted and changed focus from check execution (which other modern monitoring tools like Sensu do excellently), to event processing, notifications, and detecting emergent behaviours.

Flapjack now sits on top of existing monitoring engines like Nagios and Sensu, and provides an API for configuration, scheduling maintenance, acknowledging failures, and querying entity history (conveniently wrapped in a client library).

Flapjack can notify via PagerDuty, XMPP, and email, and also supports receiving acknowledgements from PagerDuty + XMPP.

In this talk Lindsay Holmwood takes you on a whirlwind demonstration of Flapjack's features, and explains where the project is heading.

Transcript

1. Zombie Pancakes! Rebooting Flapjack
2. Lindsay Holmwood @auxesis
3. I created Flapjack
4. I abandoned Flapjack
5. I CREATED A MONSTER
7. What happened?
8. Just me
9. Small contributions
10. Poorly maintained
11. Other projects
15. Flapjack: R.I.P. 2010
17. Zombification
18. used in production
19. fully Open Source
20. sponsored development
21. 1-3 full time engineers
23. Talk is cheap!
24. Show me!
26. New focus
27. event processing
28. filters
29. delays
30. oobetet
31. emergent behaviour
33. no check execution
34. solved problem
35. Nagios & Sensu
37. Redis backed
38. Benchmarked
39. Tested
41. Why would I use Flapjack?
42. Flapjack as platform
43. “Give me an API or give me death”
44. Contacts
45. Scheduling maintenance
46. Entity history (SLA reports)
47. Plentiful notification
48. uni + bidirectional gateways
49. Unidirectional: Email SMS
50. Bidirectional: XMPP PagerDuty
51. PagerDuty ACKs pass through
52. Multitenant from the ground up
53. “Give me an API or give me death”
54. flapjack-diner
55. client library to consume API
56. “pushing complexity to the edges”
57. authorization is complexity
58. works great standalone
59. but service provider++
60. Excellent documentation
61. flpjck/flapjack
62. https://github.com/flpjck/flapjack/wiki
63. Using
64. Developing
65. Data Structures
66. Importing data
67. Debugging
68. We care about documentation!
69. Bad documentation? BUG
70. Flapjack as platform Plentiful notification Multitenant from the ground up Excellent documentation
72. Where is Flapjack headed?
73. Two features
74. alerting & notification rules
75. dampening (rollup)
77. New focus
78. event processing
79. Redis backed
80. Flapjack as platform Plentiful notification Multitenant from the ground up Excellent documentation
81. Thank you! Questions?
82. Questions? Tweet @auxesis if you liked the talk!