Monitoring health of a Linux box?

Posted by: Roger

Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 15:00

I'm looking for something like Microsoft Operations Manager, only for Linux. Unfortunately, I can't figure out which search terms to use.

Basically, I'm looking for something that will periodically run a bunch of tests, to check that the various websites and mailing lists that I'm supposed to be hosting are up and running.

I could do it with cron, but it'd be nice to have some kind of integrated solution.

It would be nice if it was extensible, but it needs to support at least the following:

  • Connect to an arbitrary website and check that the page returned looks sensible. By sensible I mean that it contains a bunch of expected text, rather than an error page.
  • I'm not sure how to do this one without annoying people, but it should have a way to check that a mailing list is working correctly. Maybe just having a dummy mailing list at each domain, with only the test user would suffice.
  • It should be able to check that various daemons are running and responding to connect requests. This means that I can check that my SMTP daemon, IMAP daemon, FTP daemon, etc. are up and running
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 15:03

Big Brother comes to mind. I'm sure there are others.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 15:06

The article Building a Network Management System over on Freshmeat seems relevant, too. It includes references to other systems like you're looking for. Nagios looks really nice. I might have to implement that one myself.
Posted by: tman

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 15:36

Quote:
Nagios looks really nice. I might have to implement that one myself.

Nagios is flexible but it takes ages to configure. There is a good reason why there are actually companies out there offering services to configure it for you...
Posted by: genixia

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 19:53

nagios is excellent. It has some scalability issues, but nothing that will affect you.
Posted by: genixia

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 19/02/2006 19:57

Oh, I forgot to mention - I have a friend who is testing the use of nagios to monitor his home security, using magnetic door swtiches to break cat5 links. He already has nagios email and page him if his garage freezer outlet cuts out.
Posted by: gbeer

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 20/02/2006 00:47

Quote:
Oh, I forgot to mention - I have a friend who is testing the use of nagios to monitor his home security, using magnetic door swtiches to break cat5 links. He already has nagios email and page him if his garage freezer outlet cuts out.


He does that and doesn't have a switch to notify him the freezer door was left open?
Posted by: genixia

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 20/02/2006 01:10

He hasn't had problems with the door, bus has had the outlet trip without him knowing.
Posted by: BAKup

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 20/02/2006 12:54

I'm using Nagios here at my office to monitor the network here. It's easy to work with once you get the hang of the config files. I recomend it over BB. If you're wanting to see how the web interface looks over a live server just send me a PM.
Posted by: Roger

Re: Monitoring health of a Linux box? - 09/02/2008 21:40

Originally Posted By: BAKup
It's easy to work with once you get the hang of the config files.


Old thread, but I finally got around to installing Nagios v3.0rc2. It works pretty well, but the web interface could do with sprucing up...

I've currently got it monitoring HTTP, SMTP, SMTP+TLS and IMAPS on my remote server, which is working well -- in that it's monitoring them, not that they're working smile