Server Monitoring Solutions? 58
bwhaley asks: "The University I work for has asked me to research software solutions for server monitoring. More specifically, a piece of software that will monitor server variables such as load, swap usage, POP/IMAP processes, total processes, and all the other interesting data about a server's health. Watching these variables can give administrators advance warning about potential problems with the server. We are currently using an in-house solution written in Perl but its age is showing. I have found plenty of proprietary solutions such as HP OpenView and Sun Management Center, but these cost thousands of dollars. What solutions do Slashdot readers use? Are there any powerful open source solutions that I'm missing? Is anyone else running homegrown software that they are happy with? We are running an entirely Solaris environment but I am interested in any UNIX solution."
Big Sister (Score:2, Informative)
SNMP + MRTG/Cricket/... + Mon (Score:5, Informative)
If your Unix system doesn't come with one Net-SNMP [net-snmp.org] will install on many of them.
The SNMP daemon by default understands how to monitor Load Avg, Memory, Processes, and so forth. It may not be able to tell you details of the process, such as what user is logged into the POP3 daemon, but it will tell you that you have 500 of them running, and alert you (via SNMP Traps) of that fact.
ALl you need to do once you have checked the documentation for your SNMP agent and then configured it, is to setup a single (ok, maybe 2 or 3) machine to send your traps to so you can kick of alerts. With some simple scripting in $FAVORITE_SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE you can email, page, text message, update web page, or $OTHER.
Cricket [sourceforge.net] or MRTG [ee.ethz.ch] are nice utilities that will poll the servers in question (by default every 5 minutes) and produce graphs. MRTG was designed to handle network equipment and graph the bandwidth utilization, but with a change to the SNMP string, will graph anything. Cricket is the same concept but does things a little differently by using a tree configuration system for property inheritance and does graph generation on the fly instead of the at poll time method MRTG uses.
And last but not least, Transmeta produced a very good perl script monitoring package known simply as Mon [kernel.org]. This package will do active polling of the servers including issuing a transaction to the service you are monitoring. Due to the way this software monitors, you can actually see if the remote machine is alive by actually utilizing the service to monitor instead of just the "I can ping it, it must be up" mentality some people have.
Best part about all the above mentioned software is that they are all applications with an OSI Approved OpenSource license. This means you don't spend anything but TIME, and possibly a few machines to do the actual monitoring with.
And you may wonder about the impact of system performance due to the monitoring by SNMP, MRTG/Cricket, and Mon. The short answer is that I couldn't detect a noticable increase. Other utilities such as Argent (Commercial Pay For Software) would impact a HP-UX V Class 8 CPU with 8GB RAM machine from 0% on all 8 CPUs to about 20% on ALL 8 CPUs while it telneted to the machine, created about 150KB of test scripts, and then ran them.
JFFNMS (Score:3, Informative)
JFFNMS - Just for Fun Network Management System.
The site is JFFNMS.org [jffnms.org]
Look at the features, it has all you need, and of course the screenshots.
It will work on any Unix with PHP support, it will also monitor any standard compilant SNMP device or TCP Port, also if you have SNMP enabled it will tell you now many connections do you have to the specified port, apart from the connection delay.
Its open source, and fully supported, I just made the latest release a few days ago.
You could also look at the two working demos.
I hope any of you could use it, it really shows a lot of things about a host, that being a Server or a Router.