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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2010.0

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2010.0 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.

Wireshark Remote Capturing

This short tutorial is without screenshots but a slightly more advanced usecase of Wireshark, namely doing the capture on one box and visualize the captured data in realtime on another box.