General
How should I use Systems Watch?
Systems Watch service provides a clear and concise method for showing usage data of your systems, as well as help you capacity plan and budget future usage. The service is focused on getting a quick understanding of past, present and future usage at a glance.
Historically engineers would cobble together data and graphs and trend usage, while making an educated guess at future scaling needs. With Systems Watch you and your team can have a quick understanding of system usage past, present and future without the lead time of human research and modeling intervention.
Does Systems Watch provide alerting?
At this time the focus of Systems Watch is specifically on trending and providing insight toward where your infrastructure and systems are headed from a capacity planning perspective. It is complimentary to alerting tools.
How are predictions made?
Predictions are a result of proprietary machine learning "supervised" and "unsupervised" learning algorithms which analyze all previous usage data collected and produce a mathematical calculation of what future usage data will look like.
Data Collection
How often is host data collected?
Data is pushed to the Systems Watch platform from hosts in 5 minute intervals, via the sw-drone collection daemon.
What is an alternative installation method then the default copy and paste method of installing the sw-drone collection daemon?
The typical copy and paste install on hosts requires you to SSH onto the host and execute the following example command below:
curl -L https://systemswatch-install.s3.amazonaws.com/install.sh | bash -s s-00000 Host-Label-Here router.systemswatch.com holland 5392434f6eda0 ubuntu
You can automate this via a configuration management solution such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, CFengine or any other tool by following the format and producing a script. The format is as follows:
You can download installation file from here: https://systemswatch-install.s3.amazonaws.com/install.sh
You can write a bash script to be executed by your chosen configuration management tool
bash install.sh your-account-number host-label router-01.systemswatch.com username password os-type
host-label = Reference name of the system being monitored
router-01.systemswatch.com = Where the data is sent, the entry point to the Systems Watch platform
username = Account username
password = Account password
os-type = Flavor of your OS, ubuntu, redhat, etc
The best way to get the following information (account number, username, password) is to use the "Add Host" button on the Manage Hosts page. *note the username password is different than what you use to login to the dashboard. If you have further questions please send email to support@systemswatch.com
Is the data being sent to Systems Watch encrypted?
Yes, data is sent in a Restful fashion over https
How do I delete a host from Systems Watch?
Stop the sw-drone daemon by using the command "service sw-drone stop" Login to your dashboard and go to the "Manage Hosts" tab there will be a "Delete Host" button you can select. This deletion process can take several hours depending on how much data has been collected. To permanently remove Systems Watch sw-drone you can delete the directory /usr/local/sw as well as depending on your OS /etc/init/sw-drone or /etc/init.d/sw-drone
Dashboard
What does the number data or percentage represent?
The numeric data is representative of the last value received by the sw-drone collection daemon for (CPU, Memory, Load, Disk Used, Disk I/O, TCP/UDP and Bandwidth). The graph data is the representation of historic data (Day, Week, Month).
Big View
What is the "Big View"?
The "Big View" provides comparison data of (Day, Week, and Month) past and future. It also gives insight on the average and maximum values for the past and future. This is very helpful in quickly understanding usage and where its heading. The "Big View" is a great place for both engineers and engineering management to see how the systems are performing and where they are heading.
Billing
How does the free trial work?
While signing up you will provide a credit card which after 30 days of free usage will be billed on the 1st for that months service. The free trial is exactly the same as what you get as a paying client.
How do I cancel?
You will need to delete all your hosts, and then go to "Edit Account" in the dashboard and select cancel account. We will delete all your data at that point.
How secure is the billing system?
The entire Systems Watch solution has encrypted transport via HTTPS/SSL. We utilize Stripe which is PCI complaint for storing and billing credit cards, we do not store this data on our systems.