Xaprb

Cruising through my blog reader today, and came upon this blog post from Zmanda:

Our price increased today. Now we are one-tenth the cost of Symantec.

That is absolute genius. It is impossible to ignore, and will probably be remembered longer than almost anything else they could have written.

Now why would I do that, especially when my blog is syndicated through it?

Simple. I’m always trying to cut back on RSS and other “stuff.” Less is more. But don’t worry — I subscribed again. Only this time, I subscribed to my own filtered version of it! I built it via Yahoo! Pipes. And I made it public, so you can subscribe to it too.

Rob Young has posted a few blog entries lately on the MySQL Enterprise monitoring software. His latest post claims that agent-based monitoring is equivalent to extensibility (MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Agent = Extensibility).

I think this is conflating two completely distinct properties of a monitoring solution. Cacti is extremely extensible, with a plugin-based architecture and templates and all kinds of other goodies; yet it is not agent-based (actually it lets you choose — now that’s extensibility). innotop is not agent-based, and it’s extremely extensible too. Basically everything inside innotop is a lookup table of anonymous subroutines and data structures that you can tweak pretty much infinitely with plugins and configuration files that get merged into the running code dynamically. Extensibility is completely orthogonal to whether the architecture is agent-based. What about WordPress? It’s ridiculously extensible and it has nothing to do with agents.

So now that we’ve clarified that, what can we say about agent-based or agentless architectures? Which is better?