Manifesto
Why was the upsilon project created?
Short version
The original design goals were to;
- Create a monitoring system capable of monitoring anything and everything.
- Be dynamically configurable via a web interface.
- Be able to gather “checks” from multiple networks.
- Be highly distributed, flexible, extensible.
- Be FOSS.
- To satisfy a personal curiousity to build something new, to learn.
Long version
To understand that, there’s a bit of history…
The upsilon project was initially dreamed up by James Read during the final year of University; a system to collect personal information and data into a single place, a sort of personal information manager. This was James’ dissertation project, codenamed Tau. In a time with Symbian OS on mobile phones, and in the early years of Gmail and similar, there was demand for a tool that could convert contacts, emails, calendar entries and similar between different devices.
James felt that as Gmail and various tools improved integration, and Android was released, there was far less demand for such a tool. However, with multiple personal email accounts, web servers, websites, projects and similar, James wanted a system to monitor all these resources.
Initially implemented with a bunch of Nagios configuration files, the limitations of Nagios mundane configuration system quickly got tiresome. So, the idea was adapted from Tau to create a new a monitoring system, to collect metrics into a central database. In the summer of 2011, on a week’s vacation, the first few ideas for Upsilon were laid down in a bunch of Java code. Many of the current design goals of Upsilon initally still are in place today.
James: I’ve been developing Upsilon on my own, for my own purposes for now over 5 years. The limitations are well known, but the benefits continue to justify ongoing work on the project. Speaking personally, I’ve learnt tonnes in developing Upsilon, and while parts of it are ugly, and more developed projects are out there, I’m proud of what I’ve created so far and will continue to work on it while I myself get benefit out of it.
What are the goals of the Upsilon project now?
See the why page for a list of the project goals now - you can see how things have changed.
But $project is better than Upsilon!
If you think so, sure, and that’s OK. Having more FOSS choices is never a bad thing!
We maintain a list of similar projects on the competitors page.
