[CentOS] - monitoring software

Fri Oct 18 17:34:53 UTC 2013
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

On 10/18/2013 5:49 AM, Paolo De Michele wrote:
> I have a dedicated server with several services running: ssh, ftp, httpd
> (with several sites andactive domains), the mail server (dovecot,
> postfix), dns.
>
> I'd like to monitor all of these services in a graphical, easy, setting
> of thresholds and alerts via email.
> I would also like that if a customer wanted to see the graphs I could
> create codes read-only.

to echo whats already been said, and perhaps clarify...

Nagios is the classic alert package.   while its usually run on a 
dedicated server and monitors a bunch of other servers, it certainly can 
be used on a single system.   But, Graphing in Nagios is a bit of a pain.

Cacti is a excellent graphing package, same thing, its usually run on a 
central server that monitors lots of stuff on other servers, it can be 
run on the same machine.   however, setting up alerts in Cacti is 
difficult.    You may find older references to 'mrtg', well, mrtg was 
rewritten as rrdtool, and rrdtool is the basis of Cacti.

both of these systems have web based displays, and use 'agent' based 
data collection.   Its not unusual to use both at once for their 
respective strong points.

with any of these systems, you typically have a line in the agent script 
for each thing you want to monitor on a given host.   utility scripts 
such as check_postgresql.pl let you get extensive data out of postgres 
databases



-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast