Bosun

Bosun

Bosun is an open-source monitoring and alerting system created by Stack Exchange. It is designed to monitor and alert on time-series data from systems like databases, metrics systems, and web servers.
Bosun image
monitoring alerting timeseries metrics

Bosun: Open-Source Monitoring and Alerting System

Open-source monitoring and alerting system for time-series data from databases, metrics systems, and web servers, created by Stack Exchange

What is Bosun?

Bosun is an open-source monitoring and alerting system created by Stack Exchange. It is designed to monitor, analyze, and alert on time-series data from databases, metrics systems, web servers, and other systems that output numeric data over time.

Some key features of Bosun include:

  • Flexible query language (SQRL) to search, filter, aggregate, and transform time-series data
  • Customizable alerts and notifications via email, SMS, chat apps, etc.
  • Integration with commonly used data sources like Graphite, OpenTSDB, InfluxDB, etc.
  • Custom dashboard creation for data visualization
  • Anomaly detection algorithms to automatically detect issues
  • EXTENSIBLE plugin architecture to add new functionality and data sources

Bosun was created to meet the complex monitoring needs of Stack Exchange's large-scale production infrastructure. It offers more advanced analytics and customizability than many commercial monitoring tools. The open-source model also allows users to extend Bosun to fit their specific use cases.

While the configuration and use of Bosun has a learning curve, it is a very powerful and scalable monitoring system for organizations with complex infrastructures and monitoring needs.

Bosun Features

Features

  1. Open-source monitoring and alerting system
  2. Built-in expression language for creating alerts and notifications
  3. Graphite integration for storing and querying time-series data
  4. Web UI and REST API for configuring dashboards, alerts and notifications
  5. Support for tagging metrics and grouping them together
  6. Plugin architecture for adding new datasources and notification channels

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Free and open-source

Flexible alerting and notification options

Easy to get up and running for monitoring basics

Good integration with Graphite for storing time-series data

Active open source community

Cons

Limited dashboard customization compared to other tools

Steeper learning curve than other open source options

Not as fully featured as commercial alternatives

Documentation could be more extensive


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