Metal Toad Managed Services Dashboard - Part 1: The New Dashboard

For some time now, our clients have had the ability to login and see their server stats with Munin or Kibana. The problem is, both of these give more information than what is needed and the client is forced to use multiple sites to see the information.

To help solve this problem, I built the Metal Toad Managed Services Dashboard.

• Part 1 - The New Dashboard
• Part 2 - Tools for Logging
• Part 3 - Client Driven Dashboard

Dashboard Anatomy

1. Graphite: Graphite is one end of a logging suite. With it, we can get data from almost any source and display the data in beautiful, meaningful graphs. Here we are displaying the bandwidth usage and error rates of our client's server. In Part 2, we will cover more about the logging suite and the programs behind it.
2. Pingdom: We use an online service called pingdom to monitor sites that we host, which sends an email if there is any problem contacting a site. For the dashboard, I used Pingdom's API. We are able to get real time access to the status of all our client's sites and display it here.
3. Nagios: We use Nagios to monitor the health of our services and servers. The dashboard parses the server status for display.
4. Tasseo: Tasseo is a dashboard plugin for graphite. It allows us to take data from graphite and display it as a ticker so real time server stats are displayed in numerical form along with a short term trend graph.