[TriLUG] System monitoring tool

Ron Joffe rjoffe at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 23 11:32:10 EDT 2004


I'm looking for some suggestions for an open source tool (or set of tools) 
which would allow me to monitor a number of customer systems.

At each customer site I have a number of Linux servers. On each server I 
currently run a number of shell scripts out of cron for the following 
processes:

1. Check disk space on given local partitions.
2. Check multiple types of on disk error logs (these are typically os and 
application logs which I scan for keywords.
3. Check multiple application status (i.e. is an oracle process currently 
running)
4. Check within oracle database for certain errors (using SQL statements)
5. Validate status of print queues.
6. Ping other servers in the network

Currently I have these processes running out of cron on a regular basis 
(timing depends on a number of factors but can be between every minute to 
every hour).

If a problem occurs, then I have set up a list of email's to which the system 
mails the errors.

What I am lacking is a process that allows me to use more of a centralized 
approach, and a more hierarchy as to the email's that the alerts generate.

For example if disk space is filling up, I would like person #1 to get a 
single email when it reaches a threshold, and when nobody responds within X 
minutes and correct s the issue, then send email to person #2 etc.

Also I am looking for a central "Dashboard" to give me an overview of system 
status. However the client systems would have to connect to my "central 
server" to update. They would have to push info up, rather then my central 
server querying them. This is due to network / firewall configurations.

I have looked at sourceforge, etc and have found a number of interesting 
projects (Zabbix, OpenNMS, OSSIM, etc etc). Does anyone have any experience, 
suggestions as to which product would fit?

I can spend more time and modify my scripts/code to do this, but just 
wondering what others are using for similar processes?

Thanks

Ron





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