sender: "Kai Schaetzl" date: "Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 04:33:10PM +0200" <<<EOQ
Alexandru E. Ungur wrote on Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:11:49 +0300:
I use Argus for monitoring and alerting: http://argus.tcp4me.com ...Initially I was almost going to write a full essay about how much and why I like it :)
I'm using bigsister at the moment. Argus looks similar and not similar. I may want to try it out. How does it remote monitoring? Only by SNMP or is there an agent application available (short glimpse over the documentation doesn't reveal one)? I'm not familiar with SNMP at all, so it's not an option for me.
You can use SNMP with Argus, but you can do just fine without it (I don't use SNMP either btw). The remote monitoring is done by connecting to the remote application's TCP or UDP port. It does not come with an agent application (except some alfa try which I never used anyway).
It has 4 types of tests, quote from: http://argus.tcp4me.com/services.html --- quote --- * Ping - Pings a host * Prog - runs a program * TCP - tests a TCP port * UDP - tests a UDP port
Both TCP and UDP have a number of application tests built-in. Specifying an application does the same thing as setting the various bits of data to values appropriate for the protocol. But you could just as easily specify them directly.
The currently built-in application tests are:
* TCP/SMTP TCP/FTP TCP/NNTP TCP/HTTP TCP/HTTPS TCP/Gopher TCP/Telnet TCP/SSH TCP/POP TCP/IMAP TCP/NFS TCP/NFSv3 TCP/POPS TCP/IMAPS TCP/SMTPS TCP/NNTPS TCP/SIP[6] * UDP/SNMP UDP/SNMPv3 UDP/DNS UDP/DNSQ[1] UDP/NTP UDP/Portmap UDP/NFS UDP/NFSv3[2] UDP/RADIUS[3] UDP/SIP[6] UDP/IAX2[6] * several "special" tests: TCP/URL UDP/Domain TCP/RPC[6] UDP/RPC --- endquote ---
With a little swiss army knife :) aka netcat + the 'Prog' test there's no limit to what you can monitor. I monitor besides usual TCP ports, some file sizes, partitions' free space and some other stuff.
For more questions on this you can try the http://www.tcp4me.com/mailman/listinfo/arguslist mailling list as that would probably be more appropriate.
Hope it helps, Alex