Vigilant
Vigilant is a WIP project to provide an open-source and highly customizable way of driving application metrics.
Client agent's can be seen as a simple dependancy to your nodejs/python application which is enstantiated on-demand. If you application is running, then your application is being monitored. No need to watch for the pid's or wrap your applications in runner scripts.
Monitoring solutions such as Nagios or command-line tools aren't good enough for larger distributed applications. They require consultants these days to make the most out of them. In the end the currently technologies available open-source are very old fashioned. Also current solutions from Appdynamics (Java focused) or raygun.io are very expensive.
The issue arises that people used to buy a server, setup the server, setup the applications and then monitoring was added. With VM generation tools like vagrant or containers like docker machines are generated on the fly and making monitoring part of your application avoids any additional setup.
Installing the client-daemon and bindings for your language allows you to import and instantiate the daemon in a single line of code. Subsequent applications can then attach to the same daemon and each send alerts/triggers/logs/metrics to your dashboard in real-time.
