highscalability.com talks about ...

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. I really wanted to use Perl or Python to extend Reconnoiter, but Lua has some pretty magical properties that made it meld well with the noit internals. In my opinion it is perhaps one of the more technically interesting parts of the product as the search was long and the choice reluctant. When I have more time, I’ll write an article about embedding lua in noit and the deeper reasoning behind it.

Also, don’t be scared by Lua, you can always write extensions in C! Although it doesn’t meld well with its high performance design, there is an extproc module that allows writing checks as standalone scripts and operates fine with existing Nagios checks — I say I wrote it to make adoption a bit easier, but in truth Eric and Mark made me do it.