Re: Network monitor

[brian moore <bem@rom.org>]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 03:53:14PM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:37:12AM -0700,
>  brian moore <bem@rom.org> wrote 
>  a message of 22 lines which said:
> 
> > I use 'mon' (in the package of the same name).  Trivial to add new
> > monitors if you know a bit of Perl 
> 
> I use and like mon as well and you do not need Perl to write custom
> monitors or alerts. They are ordinary programs, not Perl modules, and
> can be written in Bourne shell or in C if you like.

Agreed, but I find perl ideal for it, especially since it's so easy to 
steal the 'framework' from one of the provided or 'contrib' monitors
and drop it into place.

You can monitor piles of things, and with the dependency code, the pager
doesn't explode when a system barfs.  (ie, if you ping 'mailserver', and
it fails, you don't get paged about "hey, smtp is broke!" and "hey, pop3
is broke!" and "hey, imap is broke!" (not to mention "hey, I couldn't
find out if the disk space is low!" "I couldn't find out if ssh is
responding).

Even cooler some m4, to make for a much prettier config (m4 doesn't
magically make everything look like sendmail.cf... it is really nice!).
So you can have things like:

  watch mrskull
    service ping
        MONITOR(2m, fpingv.monitor --dumpstat)
        ANNOY_BRIAN(10m)
    SSH_MONITOR_IF(mrskull:ping)
    service disk
	description available disk space
	MONITOR_IF(mrskull:ping, 5m, snmp_freespace.monitor -c community)
	ANNOY_BRIAN(10m)

etc...

Only bad thing about 'mon' is that the name, while descriptive, makes
it hard to find in search engines. :)

-- 
                            |  Old Yeller ate my cat today
 brian moore <bem@rom.org>  |  and whoopy snorped and Whoopy Snorped away.
                            |     -- the residents