HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - Monitoring

Network Monitoring Appliance

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:15:38 +0200

Network Monitoring Appliance

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Monitoring Multiple Log Files At A Time With MultiTail On Debian Lenny

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:44:57 +0200

Monitoring Multiple Log Files At A Time With MultiTail On Debian Lenny

MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of two or even more log files is possible.

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:16:27 +0200

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)

This guide shows how to install and configure Smokeping on Ubuntu 9.04 to monitor network latency. From the Smokeping web site: "SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection."

Deny Or Allow Countries With Apache .htaccess

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:23:48 +0100

Deny Or Allow Countries With Apache .htaccess

The following script is using blogama.org IP geolocation API to automatically generate Apache .htaccess file to deny or allow specific countries. You can put this script under crontab and the .htaccess rules will be automatically updated. Also, it can update multiple .htaccess files.

Simple Bash Script To Monitor Your Webserver Remotely On Different Ports

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:12:23 +0100

Simple Bash Script To Monitor Your Webserver Remotely On Different Ports

Simple bash script to monitor a webserver on different ports (here smtp, dns, http & https but it can be customized); I'm sure there are over 100 available programs doing this but I wanted something with small memory usage. Also, I only wanted to be notified once, notifications are received by SMS on my cell. With the software I was using before, I was getting notified every minute until I could reach a computer and fix the problem or stop monitoring which was quite annoying.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:08:46 +0100

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your CentOS 5.2 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

How To Make monit Send SMS Alerts When Your Server Goes Down

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:33:42 +0200

How To Make monit Send SMS Alerts When Your Server Goes Down

This tutorial explains how you can configure monit to send alert messages per SMS to your mobile phone when a service fails. Because monit can send only emails but not SMS, we will use an email-to-sms gateway where monit will send its emails to, and the email-to-sms gateway will convert the emails to SMS messages.

Monitoring UPS Power Status Using Network UPS Tools (NUT) 2.2.0 on Multiple OpenSuSE 10.3 Servers

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:54:44 +0200

Monitoring UPS Power Status Using Network UPS Tools (NUT) 2.2.0 on Multiple OpenSuSE 10.3 Servers

Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS hardware. The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide reliable monitoring of UPS hardware and ensure safe shutdowns of the systems which are connected. This document describes how to configure one machine connected to the UPS so it monitors the power status. This can relay alerts to other machines that are running off the same power line. This way, multiple servers can perform a safe shutdown in case of power failure.

Monitoring With Groundwork Open Source On CentOS 5.1

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:10:39 +0100

Monitoring With Groundwork Open Source On CentOS 5.1

Nagios is (in my opinion) one of the finest availability and monitoring solutions available. The stability, extendability and cost effectiveness (it is free under the GPL), are second to none (again, my opinion). That being said, it is far from being the easiest monitoring solution to implement. The build process itself, while not being overly complicated, can be vexing to new Linux users. That doesn't even include the configuration, which sometimes still makes me cringe.

How To Extract Values From top And Plot Them

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:39:12 +0100

How To Extract Values From top And Plot Them

Many researchers who are doing performance evaluation and benchmarking need to capture the values of the CPU and the RAM. Others might need to capture the throughput as well. In this short tutorial I will show how I capture the CPU and RAM values from “top” and then extract them in one line command.

Monitoring Multiple Systems With munin (Debian Etch)

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:39:41 +0100

Monitoring Multiple Systems With munin (Debian Etch)

In this article I will describe how you can monitor multiple systems with munin. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration. I will install the munin client on all systems that are to be monitored (including the munin server itself); the munin clients will then report to the munin server.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2008.0

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:51:20 +0100

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2008.0

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2008.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Zabbix 1.4.4 From Source On Debian Etch

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:32:08 +0100

Zabbix 1.4.4 From Source On Debian Etch

Originally posted on Zabbix 1.4.4 from source on Debian Etch. This guide will walk you through installing Zabbix 1.4.4 from source on Debian Etch. 1.4.4 has many improvements over what is currently available in apt, and it's not hard so you might as well do it this way. *Note: this walkthrough assumes that you will be running the zabbix database on the same machine as the frontend. You dont have to obviously, just do the mysql setup on whatever db server you are using and point the necessary things to it.

Intrusion Detection: Snort (IDS), OSSEC (HbIDS) And Prelude (HIDS) On Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:17:19 +0100

Intrusion Detection: Snort (IDS), OSSEC (HbIDS) And Prelude (HIDS) On Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Everybody knows the problem, you have a IDS tool(s) installed and every tool has his own interface. Prelude will allow to log all of the events to the prelude database and be consulted using one interface (prewikka). This howto will describe how to install and configure the different tools that will make up the complete solution.

Monitoring Wordpress (And Other Database-Backed PHP Apps) With Hyperic HQ

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:35:02 +0100

Monitoring Wordpress (And Other Database-Backed PHP Apps) With Hyperic HQ

This howto is for users and admins of PHP/MySQL web applications who are looking for a way to monitor the data from these applications. This howto is not geared specificially to monitoring the system resource usage of the web server and database, although that is one piece of the puzzle. Instead, the focus of this howto is using Hyperic HQ's SQL Query plugin to monitor the data contained within the backing database, in this case the number of posts, comments and users from a Wordpress blog deployment. Then, we will view this data in the context of system resource usage, to help admins correlate the information from the Wordpress plugin we're about to create with whatever other data they're monitoring from that system.