[CentOS] Recommendation On Ping And Alert Tool

Thu Sep 22 21:45:15 UTC 2005
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

From: Kennedy Clark [mailto:hkclark at gmail.com]
> 
> Great thread.  Thanks to all for their input!   
> 
> Bryan asks a good question about whether we are looking for a 
> full SNMP tool.  Actually, we have some pretty big systems 
> that already handle those functions.  For this project, we 
> are just looking for ping-type "is it up or down" information 
> on a "subset of the overall network."
> 
> It looks like Jacob's recommendation for Mon could be spot 
> on.  But, that being said, OpenNMS and Zabbix look pretty 
> cool and worth a look (possibly for other projects with more 
> complex needs).  Re a script, I was going to do something 
> like that if I couldn't get anything here :-)  but I was 
> trying to avoid having to add in the "don't send and email 
> every time it checks during a prolonged outage" (just send at 
> the beginning and maybe the end).

I'll second the recommendation of Mon.  It is simple and powerful with
very few requirements.  Mon.cgi will give you web-based access to the
status information.  It also has the advantage of being written in
Perl, so making minor changes to the monitoring or alerting routines
is very easy.  The logic to only notify once (or twice, or three
times) per outage is built-in.  You can also change the notification
routines based on the time of day and/or day of the week.  For
instance, I set mine so that it doesn't bother notifying me about
scheduled daily reboots of some of the servers.

Bowie