Re: [PLUG] server monitoring- set up threshold alerts

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 15:54, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:

On Wednesday, September 2, 2009, Ron Kaye Jr <rekaye1005@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> need to monitor server activity and send ALERTS for exceeded
> thresholds. have 2 rhel5, 2 ubuntu for now
>
> 1) any suggestions on what to monitor (? ie?? >80% processor,
> 80%disk usage, failed logins etc)
> 2) any suggestions on the best tool ( i installed webmin which
> appears, at first glance, to be pretty good)
> 3) how about network activity?

Monit =+ 1;

I've been happy with Monit (in the Debian/Ubuntu repos, not sure about
CentOS/RHEL), with some caveats.

It's a lot easier to set up than Cacti, Nagios, Munin, etc., but it is
less capable and is per-host only. 4 servers is probably starting to
approach the limit for per-host distributed verses centralized, in terms
of admin hassle. So it's quick and easy to deploy on a few hosts, but
will not scale up well.

There are useful config examples:
http://mmonit.com/wiki/Monit/ConfigurationExamples
http://www.debianadmin.com/tag/monit-examples

I don't think it does network stats, but you can have it check if all
sorts of things (ICMP, ssh, HTTP, DNS, other) are available on host B
from host A. So I run a big config on my main server that checks local
resources and makes sure it can "see" a bunch of other hosts, both local
and over the 'Net. Some other hosts run their own local instance, since
Monit can only check LOCALLY for things like disk or CPU utilization
(unlike the centralized, agent-based aps like Nagios or Cacti).

HTH,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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