[CentOS] network monitoring systems

[Alexandru E. Ungur]

>>> sender: "Les Mikesell" date: "Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 11:55:30AM -0600" <<<EOQ
> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 08:33, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> I've also had 'spong' http://spong.sourceforge.net/ running for
> close to 10 years and it still works great although some of
> the others may be easier to set up.  It doesn't have SNMP at
> all but does network probes from a central location and has
> an optional local agent for additional information.  A nice
> touch is that it has a message throttling mechanism where you
> can have it notify you about problems but limit both the
> number of times for any particular notification and the number
> of total notifications it will send.  If the machine doing
> the probing looses network connectivity for a while it won't
> page you thousands of times.
Nice, that's one feature I like very much in Argus too :D
Besides that it has escalation features, that are also very useful:

--- quote http://argus.tcp4me.com/notif.html ---
Escalating

After attempting to notify someone of a problem repeatedly, you may want
to try notifying someone else:

    escalate:    10 qpage:manager; 30 qpage:cio; 60 qpage:ceo

    which means:

        * after 10 minutes page the manager
        * after 30 minutes page the CIO
        * after 1 hour page the CEO 
--- end ---
Of course you can send emails too, instead of paging people :)
And it may be a good ideea to notify your coleagues, if a problem is not
solved within a certain amount of time, before notifying your manager :D


All the best,
Alex