Hi, author of the post here. The thing that really surprised me, when writing this, was how difficult it was to find the edge of the topic: where does process supervision end, and server monitoring begin? If most of these programs include something for handling logs, are they then also logging software? Where's the boundary between watching processes and gathering metrics on them? Good software is canonically supposed to do one thing well, but it seems like nobody can agree what handles what here. I even started writing sections on logging and server monitoring, before sanity prevailed and I chopped them out.
It's maddening that we have no clear separation of responsibilities for this stuff. And so we end up with things like Upstart's half-hearted logging, because it's not clear where Upstart's job stops.
The tangled world of service monitoring, process monitoring, process launching, configuration management etc etc et bloody c is waiting for a ZFS-style collapsing of multiple fighting tools into a single layer.
I noticed this most of all when I was writing puppet manifests that ... create Upstart scripts.
Why do I have one tool that configures and supervises the bits at rest and a completely different tool that configures and supervises the same bits in flight?
It's maddening that we have no clear separation of responsibilities for this stuff. And so we end up with things like Upstart's half-hearted logging, because it's not clear where Upstart's job stops.