So, I’ve been toying around with the idea of building application monitoring tools with Elixir. I can’t decide whether using the entire BEAM is worth adding just to manage other processes (non-Elixir processes).

I know there are already some great cloud-based tools for monitoring or process managing but I want to build some pretty custom logic depending on exits and stderr messages, etc.

A great tool that I already use is built with Node.js, called PM2, however, I don’t have the ability to add custom logic and even if I did… if I bug finds it’s way into my custom logic, Node.js isn’t fault-tolerant.

I’m not sure if many problems exist like this, but I am essentially trying to monitor blockchain nodes… Downtime is incredibly expensive because the nodes have to “catch-up” for the period in which new blocks were being created. There’s a whole slew of different custom logic triggers depending on the blockchain software’s behaviour. I hate to bring up blockchain because it’s such a buzzword, but I think that the problem could apply to any other log-based distributed system (monitoring kafka nodes for example).

Any thoughts?