Hacker News Reader

Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

Your casual tone makes it sound so easy. If only that were true!

I believe he may have meant "glue one together from parts found on Github".

Case in point: https://github.com/Shopify/dashing

Not to knock on this project, I use it and love it, but the learning curve involved here is not trivial. Using it basically requires that you're an accomplished frontend developer, and all this to just display some metrics on a page.

Here's the presumed knowledge:

    * Ruby
    * Sinatra
    * CofeeScript
    * JavaScript
    * HTML
    * CSS
    * SCSS
    * Rufus
    * Sprockets

Nine different languages and libraries! Jesus H. Christ!

It's plain to see why outfits like Splunk can get away with charging as much as they do - visualizing metrics in that app is as simple as installing a deb package, logging in, and pointing it at your data source.

Setting up Dashing by hand is comparatively ...difficult.

This is why we pay companies like Datadog and SignalFX to do it right.

...or merrily trudge along with Zabbix, or curse under the cruel rule of Nagios...

Wavefront does not do a lot of marketing right now, but they have a great product

You forgot Clojure. Riemann's monitoring config is written in Clojure.

There's a much more approachable all-JS Riemann clone called Godot that I've successfully used on multiple projects, but it still requires some work to make the frontend look good.

I saw the list and thought "hey I can manage!" ... Then Clojure came along...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com