Keeping your company’s business-critical Linux systems humming along smoothly is challenging. By the time performance bottlenecks and tuning opportunities present themselves it’s too late – your users are already affected by your slow or unresponsive website or application. This infuriates your users and costs you money.
Your Linux systems generate data — data that can be extremely valuable to your sysadmin duties. Data that can help eliminate those bottlenecks and avoid downtime. Data that can help you make decisions about load distribution to ensure systems run more efficiently. Data that helps you be better prepared for unexpected spikes in traffic, and helps you make more informed decisions concerning the future, using data from the past. We set out to build an analytics tool to solve this problem. The result: Longview.
Introducing Longview
Longview is a new statistics collection and graphing service. It logs all of your system-level metrics and displays them in eye-catching zoomable graphs. Longview makes it easy to gain instant insight into the resource use of your servers and to spot trends in things like CPU, memory, network, and processes.
You can get a bird’s-eye view of your entire fleet, or focus in on one particular server to display detailed information about running processes, listening services, active connections, and available updates. It lets you monitor disk I/O and network traffic and a whole lot more. And, it all looks absolutely amazing!
Installation
The Longview agent is open-source and can be installed on any supported Linux system – it does not need to be a Linode. Supported distributions are: Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora. There is also a tarball distribution of client for the cool kids.
Automatic installation is easy – just log into the Linode Manager, click the Longview tab, click “Add Client” and then copy/paste the one-line installation command into any supported Linux system. Within moments your graphs will start populating. The longview-agent uses your system’s package management tools, so updating and/or removing it later is easy.
What does it cost?
Basic Longview is completely FREE and includes 5-minute data resolution and 30 minutes of data retention.
Upgrading your account to Longview Pro gets you every-minute resolution and unlimited data retention, and is available in packs of:
- Up to 3 servers: $20/mo
- Up to 10 servers: $40/mo
- Up to 40 servers: $100/mo
- Up to 100 servers: $200/mo
More information can be found on the Longview product page, and Linode Library Longview article. Enjoy!
Comments (27)
Since this works on non-linode systems, does that mean I can install this on my Raspberry Pi at home?
Yes, we just rolled support for ARM systems. Please give it a shot!
Completely replaced Copperegg with this monitoring (and I happen to like it a lot better). Thanks Linode. 🙂
This is nice and cool and certainly useful but I’m a bit disappointed by the price structure, it’s a bit steep to have to pay US$20 if you have only 1 or 2 instances.
The free version is barely enough to wet your appetite: 30 minutes of retention is really not much to make it useful, by the time you notice something strange has happened, it’s already gone.
Not trying to be difficult — but why would I use Longview at the free level when it only provides 30 minutes of data when I could use New Relic (obviously the biggest competitor here) at the free level they provide 24 hours of data? I don’t follow how 30 minutes of historical data is really going to be all that convincing at the free level.
Ubuntu 13.04 is still not supported? Installed without any errors, but don’t see any data.
Setting up linode-longview (1.0.0) …
* Starting Longview Agent longview [ OK ]
System start/stop links for /etc/init.d/longview already exist.
@Endijs Lisovskis: It is supported! Please open up a ticket if you’re having problems and we’ll get right on it.
Longview Pro is priced very competitively. Look around.
We had to start somewhere with Longview free, and this is what we came up with. It may (or may not) change in the future, but at least starting low gives us the opportunity increase what you get with the free version.
Regardless, this is just version 1.0, and many additional features are planned.
@xxdesmus Good question. Would like to see some case studies too.
How does this affect Longview Pro beta users?
I just installed Longview Agent to my local ubuntu server. It works very well.
One for a Linode still has no restriction. Switch to free soon?
And any plan to open-source Longview Server as well as Agent?
I was just curious if you guys had built this with accessibility in mind. For example for us blind folks who can’t see graphs, seeing a text version of the stats would be awesome, maybe with some statistics to go along with it.
Any chance you are going to revisit Linode Managed pricing to do a similar kind of pricing structure? We are still interested, but unfortunately not at anywhere near the $1600-2000 per month it’s going to cost us based on having 16-20 smallish nodes.
I have one linode instance,the free version is enough for me.
I agree with @xxdesmus. The 30-minute retention on the free version doesn’t make any sense. It’s gone by the time you’re able to view it. Why putting in effort to implement it, if the metrics are barely there.
I think 24 hours of retention is reasonable to do with free. For people with on 1-2 nodes, it’s good enough. For bigger customers it’s a stepping stone to see if it fits the needs and upgrade instantly to pro.
Any chance for some docs on how the agent interacts with the dashboard, and what exactly thr dashboard does with this data?
I installed it. Tried it. and… another me too behind @xxdesmus … 30-min is useless to help understand if Longview provides me the view of my system(s) I need in order to evaluate if it would be worth upgrading to the pro version.
I installed Longview and it looked nice but what can one do with 30 minutes? As per the suggestion in the comments above, I installed New Relic’s PHP and OS agents and now I have 24 hour retention. Let’s face it, we’re not all running big companies off our Linodes.
I guess Longview makes sense if you need more than the 24 hours retention, in which case it’s cheaper than New Relic:
Longview: 1-3 servers for $20/mo
New relic: 1 server for $50/mp ($25/mo with annual commitment)
2 servers? $100/50. 3 servers? $150/75.
To be fair to New Relic, they do have special pricing to SMBs, and will contact you when you sign-up. Still, as Caker said, this is a v1.0 for Longview, and as we know, all 1.0 products can only improve. 🙂
As a new-relic and server density customer, I find the Longview offering very competitive and something that I will be investing in.
It would be nice if we could see disk space as a percentage of available capacity on the dashboard screen.
http://www.bijk.com – $11mth for 1 server, including 15 SMS notifications and 12mths retention. You’ll have to do better longview.
24 hours would be the sweet spot here.
Linode, thank you for new feature, but I would agree with others, who say that 30 min is useless.
I have just 1 linode for now + backup plan and I think it’s too much for me for Longview Pro.
Btw, talking about munin and Relic, do you plan to have metrics for nginx/apache/mysql/php?
Thnx.
Just wanted to add that LongView now offers 12 hours of data for the free plan.
I was JUST ABOUT to skip installing it after reading all the complaints about how 30 minutes is useless – you guys should update this post!
I have followed steps for installation of longview
but when i paste “curl -s https://lv.linode.com/Xnt2 | sudo bash” (changed) it giving me error like
-bash: curl: command not found
sudo: unable to resolve host .
Please tell me the solution.
Note I have replaced the key from my Linode in above command
You’ll need to install curl to fix that issue, and correctly set your hostname to fix the second. Details on setting your hostname can be found here:
https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/getting-started/#sph_setting-the-hostname
Someone mentioned this above.
It would be nice if we could see disk space as a percentage of available capacity on the dashboard screen.
I agree – would be great. Our linodes have had full disks on a number of occasions.