Walrus

[Login] Change #14 by OpenID IdentityMark Smith at 2011-07-06 19:32:18.

This is mostly out of date. My thinking has changed a lot in the past few years. Please follow the below link to something more up to date...

Thinking About Monitoring...

Welcome to the Walrus Project

[ Recent Changes ]

This is the canonical wiki used for development of the Walrus project, for now anyway. I expect we'll move to something like Trac later, but while we are not doing any code and are just talking about things, this will work as well as anything.

Introduction

The Walrus Project is designed to create a software tool to assist system administrators in finding more time to solve problems by doing the grunt work for them. That is a nebulous statement, so let me qualify what this project is designed to do:

  • The Walrus Framework
    • A base to build on, to provide the other features
  • Inventory Management
    • What hardware (physical, virtual) is known by Walrus
    • Support distributed locations, networks
  • Checks
    • The way we know what's going on in the infrastructure
  • Configuration Management
    • Similar in concept to bcfg2, cfengine, Puppet, etc
    • Provide simple but expressive syntax for defining the state of machines and services
  • Monitoring
    • Given the above, monitor everything that the Walrus knows about

Why Walrus?

Because when it comes down to it, if you were lost alone out on the tundra and you came across a walrus, you really don't care about anything other than "holy crap, a walrus, I need to run away." You don't stop to think about what color it is, or which way it's going. You just care about being somewhere other than where that huge, tusked creature is.

System administrators really should be the same. It is not enjoyable to spend your days fixing yet another instance of the same problem you've solved a million times. Instead, let the Walrus handle it, then go sip a Mai Tai on the beach with your Swingline.

The Walrus Mantra

There are several key points to the idea of Walrus.

  • Do something once. Administrators should be able to take any corrective action and easily add it to Walrus so that they won't have to do this action again.
  • Be flexible. With the Walrus Framework providing base functionality and robust plugin support, we allow the large pool of administrators to work together to add functionality.
  • Be easy. Going into learning a new system can be really hard. Walrus hopes to ease those fears by getting people started easily.
  • Be free. Walrus is free and open source. We want you to use it, because you using it makes it stronger, better, and more able to serve the world.

If we can accomplish those goals, then Walrus will be a success.

Development Tracking

Well, the thing has to be designed first, then it can be built when we figure out a good design that will fit various infrastructures.

[Login] Change #14 by OpenID IdentityMark Smith at 2011-07-06 19:32:18.