I’m flying back from a wonderful event: Strata. I gave a talk there called “Esperwhispering” that seemed to pique many people’s interest. This is the stuff you do when a database just doesn’t have the horsepower to answer your questions fast enough. Esper is an excellent, open-source CEP tool. It’s a shame its GPL, but hey… you can’t win ‘em all. We use esper to power many things internally at OmniTI and our clients and Esper is the code CEP engine we use to make sure Circonus custsomers know when “things go wrong.

Continue reading

I used to export data into Excel and do linear regressions on it… How I have no need. I am happier person and people like me more. Here’s how we made capacity planning easier for everyone.

Continue reading

Reconnoiter: Large scale trending and fault detectionView more presentations from postwait. Several people have asked me to post my OSCON Reconnoiter slides. Honestly, I was reticent at first because the presentation was packed full with oral content not in the slides and it had nice screencasts that end up turning into a crazy-large online movie. Suffice it to say, you need to attend to get real info out of it.

Continue reading

Last week Robert Treat told me it sure would be nice if we could reconstruct PostgreSQL logs from network captures (in the sort of antagonist way that is: "MySQL can do it, why can't we?"). With pgsniff, we can. Well, it turns out that he was complaining for a reason: a client. Our friends over at Etsy have a server that is so blindingly busy selling handmade things that logging all queries on the box degrades performance unacceptably.

Continue reading

It’s exciting to see things starting to take off. The momentum and excitement around Reconnoiter are at an all time high here at OmniTI. I really appreciate Todd Herr’s extensive write up about Reconnoiter over at highscalability.com — the review was spot on. It has ample criticism (all deserved) and we’re continuing to work on the “consumability” aspects of the product. One of the comments he made was the interesting choice of Lua as a language to extend the product.

Continue reading

A little over a year ago, I started in on a project that was of significant scope. Not a few scripts hacked together, nor a conglomeration of pre-existing tools, but rather a carefully engineered product. What product is this? Reconnoiter. About 10 years ago, we were neck deep in large scale e-mail architecture. We felt pain, we were up at 3am every night attempting to make systems work. Finally, we decided enough was enough and started a skunkworks project to build a better e-mail server.

Continue reading

Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA