Side Channel

Don't have anything that fancy like last.fm:

http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control

but we use zabbix a lot for our monitoring. It's not as efficient (mysql over rrdtool) as cacti or nagios, but definitely more flexible if you have a mix of different operating systems and ad hoc stats on very different things.

Some distros still a bit painful to set up because unless we have the backport binaries, we've to compile from source. More painful when you have lots of servers to install and upgrade when patches are released. Still have not consolidated all our servers in the zabbix monitor yet, but we're getting there.