Using Dash Sensor

February 19 2009, 11:33am

Dash gathers and tracks your metrics. Some of those metrics might be easily accessible from your Ruby or Python applications but there’s a whole host of metrics that can’t be gathered directly from your application. That’s why we created Dash Sensor, a daemon with an extensible plugin architecture. We’ve built plugins for pulling metrics from nginx, apache, memcached and starling and use those to monitor our own Dash infrastructure. Here’s a few nginx numbers from our staging environment, e.g. 33 requests in the last minute:

Sensor is Ruby-based so the plugins are written in Ruby and they can do anything you can dream of: access a SOAP or REST web service, query a billing database, or process EDI documents from your System/360 mainframe. Fortunately for my own sanity, that last one is left as an exercise to the reader.

So go ahead and experiment with Sensor. The existing plugins are for common technical infrastructure like Apache and memcached but we believe the more interesting ones are the custom ones you can write to monitor and track your own business. Good luck and happy measuring!