Software is devolving, and it is bad

Disclamer: this is a rant. Bad language included. Don't read it if you are in the Shitcon Valley

Today it was a bad day. I'm working on some monitoring related stuffs about the application we are supposed to migrate to a new system, and part of this involves porting a bunch of monitoring bits from a, let's call it "old monitoring software using XML", to that endless pile of crap that is the elastic beats stack. Paraphrasing Edsger W. Dijkstra:

> Beats is an exceptionally bad software which could only have originated in California.

And Elastic is based in Mountain View, of course. If you don't think, or don't understand, why something like elasticsearch combined with the beats is a really shit stack to base the monitoring of a huge enterprise upon, you shouldn't be allowed near anything involving infrastructure and software monitoring, and no, I'm not going to be sorry for being rude, it's just the truth.

Given my experience in both developing a monitoring system, and working as a consultant in integrating and setting up monitoring infrastructure for some of the biggest corporations in Europe and around the world, I'm going to say that if you think configuring your system, or application monitoring using YAML is a good idea:

You are full of shit.

If you are a company from the shitcon valley and think that, in 2022, writing a software that fucking requires you to write or generate a file format where spaces matters, for fucks sake, and if you put one space less or more, the fucking error is always different, you, as a company, must burn in hell, because you are part of what's making software so unpleasant to use and configure, these days.

Did I mention that it was a bad day?

I may be biased, given my experience with Zabbix, but no, for fuck's sake, it's unacceptable that in 2022, I must deal with something so bad like the elastic stack. I'm sorry, but being Zabbix GPL and free to use and redistribute, there is no reason to force that suffering upon me, with a fucking vim session open on a file, trying to fucking understand where the hell I'm putting the wrong space. When the, good, alternative, is to just give me an account, restrict my access to only the hosts I need and let me nicely click here and there, insert triggers formulas in a well organized web interface. Telling me that shitlastic is a "modern stack" and that Zabbix is "legacy", is so offensive to my intelligence that it's not even funny. If you think letting an administrator do it's fucking job, nicely, it's legacy, I would put you in charge, at most, of changing the lightbulbs when they goes bad and I will have some doubts about your competency for the job anyway.

I may even accept ANY kind of interface, desktop, even a CLI, but please, don't force me to work like it's 1950, in particular when I'm not the one in charge of the whole infrastructure, and my privileges are severely limited.

And whoever will now tell me that the elastic stack is not for monitoring, but for "data gathering": shut the fuck up. Auditbeat is not just for data gathering, it handle events. Metricbeat is not just for data gathering, it handles events, too. All those tools supports "processors", where you define if, when and how an event must be reported, or suppressed, or modified and you must do it in a single YAML section, because, you know, the idiots at elastic decided to support only ONE configuration section per module, for every beat (at least in the version we are using). And BTW, prometheus, the honey of the kubernetes people, is similarly shitty and limited, if not for the amount of automation people put in, at least, making it automatically configurable in the cloud (just generate the fucking YAML files).

Software is devolving in something so unusable and unconfigurable for a systems engineer, that we are waiting the days where punch cards will become the new shitcon valley revolution and the mainframe will be the new cloud. The disrespect the "new" companies have for their users (system administrators, devops and system engineers, in this case), is so mind boggling that I don't know how their offices aren't on fire, yet. It feels like the sendmail days, where you were supposed to edit some obscure files, and generate your configuration using m4. Mind that, there ARE tools, where a configurations file is the right solution, but defining how to monitor processes and filesystems, while working with thresholds or any kind of complex check, is not.

Shitcon valley companies covered their crappy software development practices behind the "it's modern" narrative, when it's just an excuse to not create software that is complete, featureful and pleasant to use for IT professionals and when somebody else do (like Zabbix, in the span of more than 20 years), those same companies and shitcon valley bros label it as "legacy", like if software never evolved and rusted, with time.

Do you want to write good software? Look at what the bay area companies do and go completely on the opposite direction. You will probably end-up with something more usable and better suited to your customers, instead of the pile of crap those companies spits out, these days.

It's 2022, I want to get something better, than a mentally-ill file format, to monitor my systems.