HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - Monitoring

How To Monitor And Manage IPMI Management Console

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:44:05 +0100

How To Monitor And Manage IPMI Management Console

This guide provides an overview on how to monitor and manage IPMI Management Console with Verax NMS. The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standardized computer system interface used by system administrators to manage a computer system and monitor its operation.

Server Monitoring With Icinga On Debian Squeeze

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:25:24 +0200

Server Monitoring With Icinga On Debian Squeeze

Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting. It is a fork of Nagios. This tutorial explains how to install Icinga on a Debian Squeeze server to monitor this server and another Debian Squeeze server.

Monitoring ESX/ESXi Servers

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:27:41 +0200

Monitoring ESX/ESXi Servers

The purpose is to highlight the most important topics related to setting up ESX/ESXi monitoring as well as applications hosted within managed virtual machines (a MySQL database is used in this tutorial).

How To Automatically Shut Down Your Computer After A Download Finishes

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:01:50 +0200

How To Automatically Shut Down Your Computer After A Download Finishes

Sometimes you want to download something but don't want to wait until it finishes so you can shut down the computer. In this case you can use Sentinella.

Installing Nagios On Debian Lenny And Monitoring A Debian Lenny Server

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:13:23 +0100

Installing Nagios On Debian Lenny And Monitoring A Debian Lenny Server

Nagios is a monitoring solution for complex IT infrastructures, Nagios is easy to implement and can be extended by custom-modules, called plugins. In this howto I explain howto install Nagios on a Debian Lenny host and make the configuration for it. Furthermore we are going to install a second Debian machine which we monitor with remote and local plugins.

Easy RoundCube (Over SSL) And Webmin With fail2ban For ISPConfig 3 On Debian Squeeze

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:59:18 +0100

Easy RoundCube (Over SSL) And Webmin With fail2ban For ISPConfig 3 On Debian Squeeze

I prefer the RoundCube solution over the default in ISPConfig 3. I also find it useful to have the webmin installed in all my systems. In this post you can see a very fast way to have both of them installed, in companion with the great support of fail2ban. Finally I want to access all of them over SSL (even phpmyadmin -- see the tip in the end).

Nagios Installation On Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:04:46 +0100

Nagios Installation On Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

This tutorial shows how to set up Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.4) server with the Nagios Monitoring System. Nagios is a powerful, highly configurable monitoring and alarming system, which can monitor a wide variety of systems (network, server, daemons, applications). Monitoring could be done for instance for availability or utilization. The monitoring could be restricted to services which are connectable from the outside (e.g. a webserver on port 80/tcp), or with the help of NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) plugins for testing could also be executed remote. We will be installing Nagios, Nagios Plugins, and Postfix with this tutorial. Postfix will be configured to send email via your alternate email server. This tutorial will only give you the basic configuration with Postfix, any additional settings can be found in multiple places on the Internet.

Installing Full-Featured Rsyslog 5.7.x On CentOS 5.x

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:00:04 +0100

Installing Full-Featured Rsyslog 5.7.x On CentOS 5.x

This tutorial shows how you can install new generation of syslog servers by using Rsyslog. According to Rsyslog web site (www.rsyslog.com), Rsyslog is an enhanced syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, PostgreSQL, failover log destinations, syslog/tcp, fine grain output format control, high precision timestamps, queued operations and the ability to filter on any message part. It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be used as a drop-in replacement. Its advanced features make it suitable for enterprise-class, encryption protected syslog relay chains while at the same time being very easy to setup for the novice user.

System Monitoring With sar And ksar

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:47:54 +0100

System Monitoring With sar And ksar

sar is one of the old and famous commandline utilities, which is often overlooked. It provides a wealth of information when you have kind of performance bottlenecks. By itself it only provides lengthy columns of numerical data, kind of hard to interpret. sar exists on most Linux distributions, for example Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, and is also available on Solaris, AIX, and other commercial Unices. ksar, on the other hand, is a Java based front end for sar's numerical data. It produces friendly graphs which could be exported to .pdf and some other formats.

Icinga (Monitoring Solution) Installation And Configuration On CentOS

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:01:26 +0100

Icinga (Monitoring Solution) Installation And Configuration On CentOS

Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations.

How To Monitor Your Linux Server With SMS Alerts And Performance Graphs

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:33:00 +0100

How To Monitor Your Linux Server With SMS Alerts And Performance Graphs

This tutorial shows how you can monitor your Linux server with a tool from Bijk - with email and SMS alerts. Bijk is an open source application, for creating live graphs and alerts, thus monitoring your server performance. With the Basic version of Bijk, you can easily set up email alerts for monitoring almost everything on your server (system overload, disk space usage, Apache troubles, MySQL, etc.).

How To Configure The AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) File Integrity Scanner For Your Website

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:28:42 +0200

How To Configure The AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) File Integrity Scanner For Your Website

A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone's credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally. By setting up daily reporting, this notifies you within, at most, 24 hours of when any file was changed, added, or removed. It also helps establish an audit trail in the event your site is compromised. These instructions are designed for an end user, where you don't need to have root access, to implement and assumes your server has the aide binary installed. Most hosts will have this installed already, or will install it for you upon request.

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:05:05 +0200

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool

Some of you may know the commercial Flexnet Licencing Application (©Macrovision). It's a client-server based solution for managing the usage of socalled Flexnet-enabled applications. You can hold licenses of more than one product on one license-server. As you typically have to buy licenses and licenses can be expensive it would be nice to have a monitoring solution, to see the utilization of the precious licenses, wether they are underutilized (so money is wasted) or are always fully utilized (so that you can suspect that sometimes people can not do their work, or only delayed) which is also a waste of resources. As far as I know there are commercial applications for performing such reports, but again you have to spent money. Why not build a simple system yourself, which shows the actual and past usage in an "MRTG style"?

Apache And MySQL Monitoring With Bijk On Debian Lenny

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:24:22 +0200

Apache And MySQL Monitoring With Bijk On Debian Lenny

This tutorial describes how you can monitor your server with the tool Bijk. Bijk creates online 30 graphs about load, CPU, memory, traffic, Apache, NginX, PostreSQL and others with alerts. Bijk can be used on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat and Gentoo. In this article I will explain how to install Bijk on Debian.

Postfix Monitoring With Mailgraph And pflogsumm On Debian Lenny

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:25:20 +0200

Postfix Monitoring With Mailgraph And pflogsumm On Debian Lenny

This article describes how you can monitor your Postfix mailserver with the tools Mailgraph and pflogsumm. Mailgraph creates daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs of sent, received, bounced, and rejected emails and also of spam and viruses, if SpamAssassin and ClamAV are integrated into Postfix (e.g. using amavisd-new). These graphs can be accessed with a browser, whereas pflogsumm ("Postfix Log Entry Summarizer") can be used to send reports of Postfix activity per email.