I have not yet installed BaconMap. However, looking through the demo and reading what I can of the documentation leads me to wonder about the following:

• Is there a search function? (In my environment I'd want to track 10 thousand servers at over a dozen major sites ... search by hostname would be the obvious ... other server searches: location (server room), MAC address, IP address.
• Is there an alternative "RESTful" interface? Can I create URLs which reference specific tree or map views, perform certain searches/queries from a bookmark or wiki page, etc? Could we add a "REST link" button to the existing UI (so that a normal user could create a link to almost any view or results page)?
• The ability to generate a list of impacted resources from a "down" scenario is very nice (it's the main attraction for me). Could we add support for sending notification/alerts to all impacted POCs? In particular could we use BaconMap to schedule downtime by notifying all the contacts of all impacted resources before we take down a server/service, etc?
• Automated federation and LDAP integration, command line utilities: the only way a tool like this could work in my environment is if I could my imaging system run a command line utility which would add the (newly imaged) servers to the BaconMap databases ... and if most of the data (for POCs, etc) could be extracted from our existing LDAP infrastructure. Without those features the data entry requirements preclude any buy-in. (Custom links to or extraction of data from our asset management system would be nice, too)
• How could BaconMap and Ganglia be integrated? Could an alert from Ganglia trigger a BaconMap "scenario" lookup and thus be used to aggregate the resulting cluster of alerts (service A went down ... so all the dependencies are also failing ... etc).

Obviously I see this project as having some promise ... but I naturally have concerns about how usable it will be at the scale of thousands of servers/services.

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JimD

Hi JimD, thanks for the comments.

You have some pretty hefty points there, let me go through them quickly. Keep in mind that BaconMap is still in the Beta stages and was designed with smaller shops in mind... it also has approximately one dedicated php developer at this time, and he has about a half dozen other internal projects he's working on.

1. A search feature is planned, but not currently implemented. Since we don't treat BaconMap as network dependency software and rather focus on hardware dependencies we don't track IP addresses or Hostnames. We're looking into adding IP addresses, but it's likely they would only be for informational purposes and wouldn't be used for any agent communication. Once we apply search we'll decide what fields to search on.

2. There are currently no plans for a RESTful interface to BaconMap. You can use URLs to view specific maps or view information about specific resources, but it's limited to viewing only and not full fledged CRUD operations. The idea for creating a link to a specific view or resource is a good one, and something we might consider... it would actually be quite simple to implement.

3. This is also something we've talked about doing, at least to some degree, but haven't yet implemented. Thinking about it I can certainly see the benefits, and you would indeed be able to use this functionality to send notices to a list of POC for scheduled downtime.

4. Auto-discovery of resources or POCs is something we've wrestled with in our internal discussions and we always come back to the same conclusion; because of the way BaconMap handles resource dependencies, there just isn't any way we can find to do auto-discovery and still maintain the dependency requirements. This isn't to say we've abandoned the idea, but it's something that would require more time and personnel to tackle than we currently have.

5. Honestly, I'm not that familiar with Ganglia. We've talked about integrating BaconMap with something like Nagios to do some similar things, but we haven't nailed anything down yet. I'll take a closer look at Ganglia and see what it's all about... I'm sure automatic triggering of a down scenario is possible, but I don't know that it would be implemented in any official versions or not.

Thanks for the feedback, we really appreciate it.

-Ed