New Continuous Support System 75
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting on a new continuous open-source support system that helps to keep tabs on your mission-critical applications by providing constant diagnostic monitoring. The system is designed to match specific 'signatures' from your applications to a database of over 200,000 possible 'problem' signatures and alert the user for correction or analysis. From the article: 'SourceLabs' Continuous Support System features what Sebastian calls "adaptive diagnostic probes" that are fully integrated and configured for customer environments. The probes identify production issues and begin to gather diagnostic information to help get to the root of the problem, he said. Indeed, the probes can be configured so that as soon as a problem occurs, the SourceLabs support team extracts system information to find and resolve the problem. And the system includes a database of more than 200,000 signatures of problems that might occur.'"
Please Clarify (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please Clarify (Score:5, Informative)
Real News or PR?!! (Score:3, Informative)
Lowering firewall (Score:5, Funny)
Analysis Spock?
Insufficient data. It may be a successful penetration from the Romulan sector. Or...
Or?
Or accounting is performing their end of month reconciliation jobs.
Puzzled (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Puzzled (Score:4, Informative)
No Link (Score:2)
Bruce P. summarizes it below, and a poster above mentions Zabbix and Naggios.
There's been a bunch of interested work in monitoring and diagnostics with "Netsaint / Nagios for some time. SysAdmin has had a few *very* cool articles [samag.com] about not just network monitoring with it, but resource monitoring and preventative maintenance of all kinds.
IT Groundwork's done some very interesting things. [groundworkopensource.com]
SpikeSource is doing similar stuff (presumably so "y
Re:Puzzled (Score:5, Informative)
One interesting point is that you don't call customer service. They call you.Bruce
Re:Puzzled (Score:3, Informative)
Insanely configurable -- can catch all sorts of problems. Can run a definable shell script when something breaks -- I'm not talking about "automatic message" or emailing someone at Sourcelabs, we had the thing configured to send an email/SMS to the main admin's phone. Cuts out the middleman -- the program calls me, I fix the problem. Works well when your "customer support" is often in-house.
Re:Puzzled (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
Bruce
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
The Phone Conversation (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, is Arnold around? This is Frank over at SourceLabs.
Hey, Arnold. It's me again. How's it going tonight?
Oh, really, it's 2:30am there? Wow.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's raining here in Seattle, of course.
Hey, listen, the reason I'm calling is because your shit, yeah, yeah, it's crashing again.
Hey, don't blame me. Talk to your manager about it.
Well, he's the one that bought this support.
Listen, though... the stack trace pops up on my screen here and I'm supposed to give you a call.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's 24x7. You're somewhere in that 24 and somewhere in that 7, so here I am.
Yeah, I don't enjoy this either.
I know what you mean.
Well, the stack trace looks like your Oracle database is hosed again.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Well, you're using the thin-client drivers.
Looks like you can't get any JDBC connections. What a bitch.
I know, sucks that your site is down. What a pisser.
Well, most people monitor this kind of basic stuff on their own.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
Well, maybe some log4j and Nagios would work. Or something.
Yeah, really. It'd save the time it takes me to call you. Good thing you're only taking like 100 orders/minute at this time of day. Heh heh heh.
Yeah, I had to wake my ass up early this morning, too. I'd almost rather be doing drywall at the new McDonald's.
Yeah, ok, cool. Well, see if you can get your Oracle P.O.S. back up again.
Definitely.
Cool.
Well, I'll probably talk to you soon. Bye!
Re:The Phone Conversation (Score:1)
I've *been to that McDonalds. (Score:2)
Re:Puzzled (Score:1)
Do I even have to say anything at this point?
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
Don't you mean "We call you"? From the recent article on software patents:
"Bruce Perens may be best known as the creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of Open Source and the canonical rule set for Open Source licensing. He is currently a vice president of Sourcelabs."
If this is true, I would certainly have expected a disclaimer in the interests of full disclosure.
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
Regarding my use of "they", I don't really have anything to do with this product or the people who would call you. I do other stuff at Sourcelabs.
Thanks
Bruce
Re:Puzzled (Score:2)
No, I hadn't heard. In fact, this is the first time I've even heard of Sourcelabs. Of course, this proves the old adage about making assumptions.
Regarding my use of "they", I don't really have anything to do with this product or the people who would call you. I do other stuff at Sourcelabs.
Naturally. I was tongue-in-cheek referring to the "royal we" as you no doubt used what might be called the "royal they".
Cheers.
Maybe it's like Zenprise (for Microsoft Exchange) (Score:2)
The product might work something like Zenprise for Microsoft Exchange. The Zenprise product does the following:
Signatures? (Score:2)
Re:Signatures? (Score:4, Interesting)
You may not be the first customer to hit the problem. Also, the problem can manifest itself in a non-signature-dependent manner, like throwing an exception. Then if you are not the first to see it, signatures may come in to play in telling you why the exception happened.
I've seen this. (Score:5, Funny)
The interesting thing is that no matter which 'signature' is noticed, the alert always reads "omfg n00b! read the fvcking manual!"
Wonder if there is a signature for (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wonder if there is a signature for (Score:1)
Splunk with a different name? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Splunk with a different name? (Score:1)
Splunk seems pretty cool. While it does give you a view of a lot of data, there are no probes (so you can't see inside of apps that are broken to fix them, and it doesn't tell you when something is wrong), and apparently no advanced search/matching technology (e.g. pattern recognition) above and beyond human-operated search. One of the things our signature matching does is spot correlations that wo
Of course not! (Score:1)
Software is free, support is not (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Software almost always sucks to some degree
2) People are excellent at finding new ways to break "rock-solid" software
You know, the whole "make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot" type thing.
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:2)
But otherwise, that's a basic conflict of all profit oriented processes. For example, the longer your products last, the less you will sell. So why should you produce durable products? Also, given that your doctor only earns something from you as long as you're ill, where's his incentive to make you healthy?
Note that selling proprietary software licenses also leads to the same problem, just in another way: Yo
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:3, Interesting)
I think there is ample evidence in the enterprise software industry to contradict this theory.
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:1)
If the product is difficult to use, they will make more money off support. If it's rock-solid and completely intuitive, their revenues will crumble. Am I making any sense?
Do you honestly think it's possible to make a product so that the majority of office working idiots will not find something to cry for help about?
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:2, Interesting)
In the case that you sell subscriptions, the software needs to be rock solid because you lose money on hard support calls. Large companies will still want support because of the case that something does go wrong, they need someone to call. Long term, as the market matures, you would expect support contracts to take into account the statistical ch
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:1)
Company A takes a vanilla distribution of Linux, and differentiates themselves by providing "better" support than the others.
Company B takes a vanilla distribution of Linux, and differentiates themselves by adding innovative new features that people want (for example, package management a la Debian or Gentoo). Despite the fact that these new features are open source, Compan
Re:Software is free, support is not (Score:1)
In the commercial software world the trick is that you get everyone to pay about 18% (that is the norm) of upfront licensing fees every year as an ongoing maintenance / support contact. This provides you with good cash flow.
If your software is anywhere near decent you will probably find only a small percentage (say 10%) of these customers actually have problems that cost you anywhere near
Under Engineered (Score:1)
Maybe they should just assume the marketing and sales adage "The customer is always right" and just forgo the whole support system all together.
P.S. Sorry for the lack luster sarcasm, but a story about customer support and problem signatures is a bit to exciting for me to make fun of. Seriously.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
And no, I'm not going to RTFA...if the submitter isn't articulate enough to succinctly describe what it is he or she is submitting, I'm not going to waste my time following the link.
Instead, I'm going to waste my time writing inane comments such as this...
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
All of the components are there: the Rob Enderle-tainted eWeek runs a shill "review" of a product that they were paid to look at, then the company's PR flack sends it to Slashdot as an "anonymous reader". Who knows if money is involved on the Slashdot side, but the mechanism is the same.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
And the most common problem is... (Score:1)
Re:And the most common problem is... (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes you can get some use out of them but you've got to spend a whole lot of time with it in setup and ongoing adjustments.
Too many managers buy these things expecting a "Magic Bullet" solution.
Re:Yea, right. (Score:2)
Bruce
200,000! (Score:1)
great more bloat-ware (Score:1)
This just in... (Score:1)
Zenprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, it was a very interesting and difficult problem. One of the biggest rubs was the level of assurance you had to provide. In otherwords, can you let the system make changes on its own or should it just recommend changes? If the system mis-diagnoses even one problem, it might break more stuff than it fixes. Most monitoring tools have big problems with 'false positives'. Add to that that the system can't necessary 'undo' all changes. Our solution was to allow the administrator to run the system in a variety of modes so they could choose if the system applied the fix automatically, with approval, or just suggested how to fix the problem.
As for how the system actually works, it basically takes a middle approach between ML (machine learning) and KR (knowledge representation). Basically, either you can hard code all the types of problems you have in a KR language, or setup some big neural net (or other ML algorithm) and let the system 'learn' problems. We split the difference and added some domain knowledge. Certain types of 'features' (parts of a diagnose such as the disk is slow) were diagnosed by ML algorithms, but ultimately KR rules written by Exchange experts actually diagnosed the problems and suggested repairs. A very time consuming, but more reliable solution (but less cool).
Marketspeek: New for OSS (Score:2)
From the company website [sourcelabs.com]:
200000 ways to fail isn't that much... (Score:1)
- No output
- Non zero return status
- Any output that is not 'Hello world'
If it wasn't the first program I've ever written and I had more time, I probably could get to 200000.
Re:200000 ways to fail isn't that much... (Score:1)
- Does not even start (e.g. you forgot to compile it, or didn't give an absolute pathname and it's not in your PATH)
- Does start, but doesn't find a required DSO (e.g. libc.so)
- Does start, outputs "Hello world", and then additionally outputs something else
- Does output just "Hello world", but needs half an hour to do so
- Does start and outputs "Hello world", but doesn't ever end (enters infinite loop)
Re:200000 ways to fail isn't that much... (Score:2)
You can eliminate a few of those easily:
Depending on your shell / dynamic linker, that falls under either "No output" or "Output that is not 'Hello, World'". Additionally, I can almost guarantee you'll get a non-zero return status.
Which would indica
From the sourcelabs website: (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but I thought I need support when something unusual occurs or I want to do something unusual with the software. Timeliness and effectiveness is allways required, but how can a 'bot provide support? Support is one of things that explicitly is *not* provided by software but by humans, no? Our does this software include automatic hacking attacks and phone pranks on OSS developers that don't update, bugfix or document their
Got that same press release... (Score:2)
But that's just us...
- Robin
200,000 probes ???? (Score:1)
This doesn't seem incredibly new to me... (Score:1)
I just want updated software! (Score:2)
Sympathy sickness ? (Score:2)