Alerting with Alert Birds
Back during my ISP heydays in the late 90s, I stumbled across a project called Peep The Network Auralizer. Peep basically takes things like netflow events from remote clients and sends them to a audio enabled server. Network traffic sounds like running water. Pings sound like birds chirping. SSH logins like frog croaks. The result is something that sounds like one of those sleep machines from the 80s.
What was really interesting about Peep, besides the fact it could lull you to sleep, was it could notify you of events that were important in aggregate but not necessaraly by themselves. A ton of failed SSH logins became a chorus of servers crying for help. High network load became a rushing river.
Now I look back on it, my use of Peep was my first pass at alerting and monitoring complex events in my infrastructure. Today it's also a good excuse to build an app for Loggly which makes a bunch of stupid bird noises.
Alerting Rules
Alerting is the #1 Loggly customer requested feature, so much so in fact that I broke down a few months ago and wrote a post on doing alerting with Loggly and Pagerduty.
After I wrote the post one of our customers commented that it sucked he had to run his own server to execute the cron jobs which ran the searches on Loggly. He's right. Requiring your users to run yet more infrastructure just to use a core bit of your service isn't the best way to win favors. And, it certainly doesn't scale well.
On that note, I'm pleased as punch to announce Loggly is now shipping alerting via the Alert Birds service. You can follow the Alert Birds on Twitter too!
Using Alert Birds with Loggly
Using Alert Birds with your Loggly account is simple. Navigate to the Alert Birds website and then log into your Google Account. Once you are logged in, you'll be given a form that allows you to enter your Loggly's account 'subdomain'. Once you submit your subdomain, you'll be taken to Loggly to login to that account and grant access to the Alert Birds' app. You'll be taken back to the Alert Birds' site when you are done authing the app to Loggly.
Alertbirds allows you to create an unlimited number of alerts, each of which are comprised of saved searches run on Loggly and endpoints that get called when searches return above or below a given threshold. Alerts are run on a schedule you define, and the endpoints currently (only) support pushing events to PagerDuty's APIs for notification. Alert Birds also allows you to trigger sound events in a browser viewing the Alert Birds' website.
Here's a short video on using the Alert Birds' application (sorry for saying um so much):
For more detailed setup info, you can reference our wiki page on Alert Birds. If you'd like to trigger an alert for Kord on his blog, click here.
Apps for a Logging Platform
We've Open Sourced the Alert Birds project to help illustrate how easy it is to build a logging application on Loggly. Alert Birds was writtien to run on Google's AppEngine service, but we'll be launching other apps soon that run on other frameworks and services.
Keep an eye out for more applications and app support coming out of Loggly in the near future. We're working on apps like a 3D globe for visualizing website traffic, web analytics, application reporting, and more!
Kaycee 20 Jan, 2012 03:01am
The voice of rtoaianlity! Good to hear from you.