[Gllug] Rebooting Server

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 11:56, Mark Fowler wrote:
> Okay, my co-lo server rebooted itself this morning.  Ruling out problems
> with power from the co-lo place, how do I determine what went wrong
> (there's nothing in the syslog but timestamps?)
> Okay, a better question.  How should I be monitoring (logging) what's
> going on the machine.  For example, if I want a record of the load on the
> machine what's the best way about going about this?  I could easily write
> a million and one perl scripts to do this kind of thing for me, but I'd
> rather not reinvent the wheel, so I thought I'd ask for advice.
> 
That's something I'm quite interested in.

Have a search for mrtg and rrdtool, and look at some of the packages
people have built to add to this, for example Cricket.

Being lazy (a good virtue of course) I will also echo a list of packages
which came up on the Linuxmanagers list yesterday.
Opennms is missing from the list, but is more for network gear IIRC.




My questions were:
> 1. Which monitoring and/or reporting system(s) would you recommend
>    which have good documentation?
> 2. Are there any good tutorials available on this topics?
> 3. Do you have some advice based on your experience about pitfalls to
>    avoid?

I have received replies from Brett Geer, Bertrand_Hutin, Dusan
Djordjevic, Steve Foster, Mike Renfro, Thomas Kern, Alistair Mann, Jim
Carroll, Ambrose, Jeffrey Taylor, Martin Schmitt, Andrew Rakowski,
Sean Ryan and Brian Coyle.  Thank you everyone!

The recommendations were

1. Big brother (http://www.bb4.com)
2. nagios (http://www.nagios.org)
3. BMC Patrol or HP-OpenView (commercial)
4. mon (http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/
5. Spong (http://spong.sf.net)
6. mrtg (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/)

7. snmp (http://sourceforge.net/projects/net-snmp) with tutorial at
  
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596000200/qid=1042473850/sr=11-1/ref=sr_+11_1/103-7287160-3348618

8. eximon - for exim stuff (with tutorial at
  
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596000987/qid=1042473888/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2+_1/103-7287160-3348618)

9. Sitescope" from Freshwater Software (commercial:
   http://www.freshwater.com/SiteScope.htm)
10. And a "pitfall"-related warning: "Drop the 'has to be browsable
    via a website' requirement until you have the monitoring and	
    reporting side done first"

Obviously I can not comment on my findings because there is a lot of
investigating and experimenting to do.  Thank you again for valuable
information.  It might in the future bother you with requests for help
configuring the system.

Regards.
Johann
--
Johann Spies          Telefoon: 021-808 4036
Informasietegnologie, Universiteit van Stellenbosch




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