topic Re: monitoring in Operating System - Linux

monitoring

trystan macdonald_1 — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:15:34 GMT

Hi,
Does anybody know any good monitoring tools that are available for Linux Redhat 8.0?

Thanks,
Trystan

Re: monitoring

Balaji N — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:21:17 GMT

try mrtg.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

it is a network monitoring tool but can be customized to monitor anything.

-balaji

Re: monitoring

trystan macdonald_1 — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:27:28 GMT

Thanks balaji,

Are there any other tools, I have had trouble configuring this one.

Trystan.

Re: monitoring

Sergejs Svitnevs — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 13:22:24 GMT

You can check the following link:

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=linux+monitor

Anyway, my personal recomendation is MRTG.

Regards,
Sergey

Re: monitoring

Jerome Henry — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 13:27:36 GMT

What happens with mrtg, it's still the best.
You can also try big brother :
http://www.quest.com/bigbrother/
HTH
J

Re: monitoring

Jean-Pierre Denis — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 00:58:51 GMT

Hi,

take a look at http://www.raxnet.net/products/cacti/ .

It's supporting SNMP and all the info is stored in a MySQL database.

Very easy to use and to configure.

Thanks,
JP

Re: monitoring

Balaji N — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 01:27:57 GMT

hi
mrtg is the best. else there is big brother. but never tried it myself.

may be if you tell what was the problem you faced, someone here might be able to help.
-balaji

Re: monitoring

trystan macdonald_1 — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 06:16:09 GMT

Hi,
Not really sure where to start. I have installed mrtg and have configured apache so that I get the mrtg home page and documentation however I haven't found the documentation very clear from there and therefore have hit a brick wall.
Thanks,
Trystan.

Re: monitoring

Trever Furnish — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 20:37:06 GMT

It really depends on what you mean by "monitoring" and what you want to monitor.

MRTG was originally meant for recording and graphing the traffic levels on router interfaces via snmp, so it comes with tools to make that happen pretty easily, but in order to graph any other data, you have to put in more effort to obtain the data (figure out the SNMP OID or write a script to get it some other way).

MRTG wasn't particularly efficient when it came to data collection, storage, or graphing, and the person who wrote it supplemented it with RRDTool, which is not only more efficient but also a great deal more flexible (and more complicated).

If what you really meant by monitoring wasn't "collecting performance data", then maybe you meant "sending alerts when something bad happens".

If that's what you meant, then Big Brother, Big Sister, Spong, and (my favorite) Nagios (formerly called NetSaint) are what you want.

There are lots of others - these are the ones I have experience with. Nagios is definitely my recommendation out of that group - it's got great documentation, a very active community behind it, and a very nice interface, with good support for intelligently managing alerts, downtime, outages, etc. It's also far more capable than the others (scalable, distributed, fail-over ready).

http://www.nagios.org

There's also RedHat's newly updated Redhat Network, which now has an integrated monitoring tool if you choose to purchase it. All I've seen are the screenshots.

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhen/system_mgmt/

Those are the inexpensive ones I know about. If you are willing to spend lots more money for slightly less admin overhead, then Computer Associates Unicenter and IBM's Tivoli are both available on and for Redhat too. Openview also has some Linux monitoring capabilities. Unicenter doesn't have an agent (so far as I can find) for Linux, even though their management platform runs there.

Re: monitoring

trystan macdonald_1 — Thu, 01 May 2003 13:48:14 GMT

Thanks all for your response on this. I think I will carry on with configuring MRTG.
Regards,
Trystan.

Re: monitoring

Dan Wanek — Fri, 02 May 2003 04:01:58 GMT

I just wanted to throw in my 2cents. I've really liked "mon". It's a perl based monitoring tool that is fairly easy to setup as well as extend for monitoring specific things. There is also quite a few monitoring modules out there that already exist.

http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/

--

cheers,

Dan Wanek

Re: monitoring

Paddy_1 — Tue, 06 May 2003 10:50:30 GMT

you might also want to have a look at this free tool called "RTG" which seems good.It can be downloaded from Source forge

Re: monitoring

spanky mcfoo — Tue, 13 May 2003 21:33:56 GMT

I have to second the suggestion to use "nagios" earlier. We used to use HP OpenView, which was overly complex (and expensive) for what we needed. If you want to get a page when, e.g., disks are full or load goes above X, then nagios does it best.

If you're not comfortable with gnu tools/compiling/etc., then there's a commercial product called "sitescope" (now owned by Mercury Interactive) which has similar functionality, but it's all written in java & served up via web.

MRTG is o.k., but we use cricket (http://cricket.sourceforge.net/), also based on rrdtool. Its configuration is setup differently & it seems to be more efficient than MRTG when you have thousands of monitors running.

Hope this helps!

Re: monitoring

Peter Vandenberghe — Mon, 19 May 2003 12:09:53 GMT

Hi,

You should rely try to configure Nagios first.
Monitor HTTP, SMTP, SNMP, PIN, telnet, POP3 services easily.
I also use nagios to monitor our backups.
Nagios has plugins to monitor data from MRTG and RRD.