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gerdesjtoday at 2:04 AM0 repliesview on HN

"What I really wanted is a web interface which will just show me EVERYTHING it knows about the system in a form of charts, graphs, so I can just skim through it and check if everything allright visually, without using the shell and each individual command."

Yes, we all want that. I've been running monitoring systems for over 30 years and it is quite a tricky thing to get right. .1.3.1.4.1.33230 is my company enterprise number, which I registered a while back.

The thing is that even though we are now in 2026, monitoring is still a hard problem. There are, however, lots of tools - way more than we had in the day but just like a saw can rip your finger off instead of cutting a piece of wood, well I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

Back in the day we had a thing called Ethereal which was OK and nearly got buried. However you needed some impressive hardware to use it. Wireshark is a modern marvel and we all have decent hardware. SNMP is still relevant too.

Although we have stonking hardware these days, you do also have to be aware of the effects of "watching". All those stats have to be gathered and stashed somewhere and be analysed etc. That requires some effort from the system that you are trying to watch. That's why things like snmp and RRD were invented.

Anyway, it is 2026 and IT is still properly hard (as it damn well should be)!