blackbox Instant Metrics : monitoring without agent and without proxy
blackbox cloud (formerly fdmon cloud) became a powerful "analytics as a service" platform, designed especially for the monitoring, the trending, events management, events prediction, ... but not only for IT purpose (data driven activity in general).
To monitor your infrastructures or services with blackbox cloud, you don't need to deploy any agent. You need only to deploy a Proxy Server that will be in charge of collecting all metrics of your infrastructure components and applications. Even if this operation is quick and easy (a few minutes), there is another way to start a monitoring process without any agent and without any Proxy Server.
The most usual use case for this alternative is when a client already operates its own monitoring infrastructure but wants to use immediately the power and analytics features of blackbox cloud, without changing anything from his side.
Indeed, blackbox HTTP front-end provides a trivial REST API that allows you to upload, analyze and historize data, directly from the command line of your favorite operating system for example.
The following example shows how to send securely some information directly to the blackbox cloud (here, the list of processes for a specific Unix server) :
ps -ef | curl -s -f --form "user_id=xxx" --form "signature=yyy" --form "action=send_section" --form "ci=ci-name" --form "section=section-name" --form "data=@-" https://blackbox-cloud-url
Note : the User ID and signature are unique and associated to the client.
Then, from the blackbox cloud, you can easyily build all what you want from this data in terms of analytics (events, problems, trending, history, forecast, HTML pages, dashboards, reports, big data, etc ....) thanks to the blackbox Analytics Studio.
This alternative can be very helpful when you need suddenly to analyze some new metrics provided by your infrastructure or application but don't have time or resources to deploy all required packages, tools and requirements in general.
It is also a complementary solution to ingest specific data that couldn't be collected in "agentless" mode from the Proxy Server. By this way, blackbox cloud can claim to meet 100% of needs, even the most specific, in terms of IT monitoring ... but not only.