Freshwater Software has a great site monitoring suite called SiteScope. It allows you to watch dozens of different events and resources on any number of servers. Priceline has more than 4000 monitors set up with this software watching things 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, we have these monitors across 6 servers and 3 data centers in 2 continents. We needed a way to bring all of the SiteScope data together in a single place.

  1. Simplified visualization of current warnings and errors, and
  2. Baselining and historical trend analysis.

SSM allows us to do both of these. It is able to handle the more than 10 readings per second. The current database has almost 2 months worth of data, is 5.5 GB, and still is reasonably responsive. It’s written in a combination of Perl, C, SQL, JavaScript (using DOM), and HTML.