Thanks for your reply. I actually do have a couple related "practice" questions for the theory guy. Do you have any recommendations on good tools for:

a) visually modeling your servers (something more than just lists of instances)

b) tool for monitoring all active jobs to make sure they're all running (I know, lots of ways to solve this one, Deadman's Snitch, Jenkins, etc., but curious what you think)

c) basic tool for dashboard of servers (I guess Nagios is the most common, and there's also commercial tools like Librato).

I realize those are loaded questions. Feel free to answer partials if you're short on time. Thx for your input!

Sorry for not responding sooner, I'm actually at my employer's user conference, so I was lured away by the prospect of food and booze.

a) No! Though this is actually a conversation I've had here with a couple of customers - people want a good service modeling and visualization option. I'm thinking about how that might work.

b) So, I think this is a space where the commercial tools (my employer makes a really good one, control-M) do better than OSS, I think because the nuance of job management and scheduling is so boring and detail-oriented. For OSS, Rundeck wants to do this work.

c) Nagios, Monit, Zenoss - all can do what you want, depending on the nuances of the use cases.

Hope this is helpful, thanks for the questions.

Thanks very much for your reply. Both Rundeck and control-M look like they're worth checking out.