NUMB3RS
Stars David Krumholtz, who had a big part in Serenity. Krumholtz plays a mathemetician that uses math and computers to help catch the bad guys. They actually have a mathemetician on staff to help write the script (I have a friend who's an editor on the show).
Good points. However, I think there's something to be said about automating things to increase uptime and lessening the load on the sysadmin, especially if it's critical that the service be available and you always go through the same checks (e.g. check/var/adm/messages, run look at the process table, load, etc.) that you go through. There's also a tradeoff in knowing details of what caused the problem if every minute your server is down, your company is or could be losing money, like for someplace like ebay.
Oh, and I think these packages are installed as part of debian, either by default or optionally. That's why the article mentioned apt-get.
I've tried both Nagios and Cacti for years. They work great, are very feature rich, and seem to have a strong community.
The one thing that annoys me about them is that, out of the box, they don't have much configured, and to install/configure stuff, you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
In the case of cacti, it's mostly through a web-based GUI, which is OK if you have one server with one thing you want to measure, say %CPU usage, that you want to measure, but if you want to do it for a server farm or even a couple machines, it's a pain in the butt. They do have a templating system, but you still have to do a lot through the GUI. I've posted on their forums before to this effect, and they have suggestions for making changes like this en masse, but again, it doesn't work out of the box. Bottom line, the designers of cacti seem to be focused on the Web GUI, which is kinda nice for newbies, but a huge pain for people like me that like to script things.
It's the same thing with Nagios, although at least they let you change text files for the settings. Although the number (about 20) of files is reflective of how feature rich it is, it also makes it a hassle to set up. Here's an article at samag.com that illustrates the process you need to go through... imagine this for a couple hundred servers, and you can see how arduous setting up nagios could be.
So, although munin may not be as mature and well known as cacti, and monit not as popular as nagios, I think they're still worth trying out..
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NUMB3RS Stars David Krumholtz, who had a big part in Serenity. Krumholtz plays a mathemetician that uses math and computers to help catch the bad guys. They actually have a mathemetician on staff to help write the script (I have a friend who's an editor on the show).
Oh, and I think these packages are installed as part of debian, either by default or optionally. That's why the article mentioned apt-get.
The one thing that annoys me about them is that, out of the box, they don't have much configured, and to install/configure stuff, you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
In the case of cacti, it's mostly through a web-based GUI, which is OK if you have one server with one thing you want to measure, say %CPU usage, that you want to measure, but if you want to do it for a server farm or even a couple machines, it's a pain in the butt. They do have a templating system, but you still have to do a lot through the GUI. I've posted on their forums before to this effect, and they have suggestions for making changes like this en masse, but again, it doesn't work out of the box. Bottom line, the designers of cacti seem to be focused on the Web GUI, which is kinda nice for newbies, but a huge pain for people like me that like to script things.
It's the same thing with Nagios, although at least they let you change text files for the settings. Although the number (about 20) of files is reflective of how feature rich it is, it also makes it a hassle to set up. Here's an article at samag.com that illustrates the process you need to go through... imagine this for a couple hundred servers, and you can see how arduous setting up nagios could be.
So, although munin may not be as mature and well known as cacti, and monit not as popular as nagios, I think they're still worth trying out..
This book has a lot of nice pictures and diagrams, and explains not just hard drives and CPUs but things like GPS, Napster, etc. (although I have the sixth edition, I'm assuming the current eighth edition is probably similar). http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0789734249/sr=1-2 /qid=1137531708/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-3267622-7897402?_ encoding=UTF8