System Monitor Question

[tmwillett]

I'm wondering if there is there any sort of system performance monitoring ability built into either the Orbiter or the Webadmin page?  Something other than SSH into the core to view system performance.  If so, can you tell me how to find it?  If not, can someone give me an idea of the level of effort to develop such a feature?  I'd like to view the core performance (cpu, memory, IO, etc) as well as the MD's if possible.  Sort of a total view of the system.  I'm not a Linux guru by any means, but can usually hack some stuff together if someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks

[rperre]

Your question sparked me to do a search to monitor multiple pc's on a network and i found the following.

http://msetimon.sourceforge.net/

With some work you could probably make this show in webadmin or an orbiter, not sure where to start but you can look at the system first.

I don't think this is something very "needed" in orbiter, but just a tool for the admin to see what "bogging up" an md. You can just ssh into the one though and run top from command.

Richard

[Sigg3.net]

All you need is top.

But there are a lot of Linux tools available, judging by the number of "admin tools" articles in Linux Journal and LinuxMag the last year.. I'll see if I can find what you need there.

Btw, Nagios is all the rage these days but perhaps a little overkill; http://www.nagios.org/

[tmwillett]

Just as an update for everyone.  I successfully installed Nagios and the NRPE plug-in to monitor my LMCE installation.  Nagios has all of the features I want, and it has a nice easy to read web interface for the 'non-technical' folks in my family as well.  It allows me to monitor the health of all of my systems, as well as Internet status.  Now, when the wife is having problems on the Internet, she can pull this up in her browser and see if the problem is in-house or somewhere else.  I can also see how the LMCE environment is performing (processes, load, disk utilization, etc).  One thing to note during the installation.  NRPE wants to install xinetd.  Don't do this, or it will break LMCE.  You'll need to install NRPE w/o xinetd and run it as a daemon on the core and media directors.  Other than that, everything works great.

[klovell]

Good job!  Just throwing it out there, I gave nagios a try at monitoring my network and I immediately noticed it was reporting false information.  Things like memory, It was reporting my router at the time as having 4GB of ram with 2GB used when in fact the router only had 2GB of ram total and at the time only about 30% was being used.  Just make sure all your information is correct.  For what you're using it for these types of inaccuracies makes the monitor pretty useless. 

That brings me to Zenoss.  I was already using this and was testing out Nagios (so I didn't really try to fix Nagios.(I still have the VM so maybe i'll give it another try)).  I think for the non technical the GUI for Zenoss if way more intuitive and the dash board makes it easier to see everything at a glance. If you like Nagios you'll want to marry Zenoss.  On that note Nagios seems easier to configure and I like that it's agent based.  It's not that Zenoss is hard to install, it's telling it what you want it to monitor on any given node that's not to clear.  I'm Not suggesting you switch but based on what I just read (wanting the whole family to see what the system is doing) I think Zenoss would be a better choice. All the information you want is clear as day and in your face as soon as you log in plus if you have an email server or a live.com account you can get some pretty self explanatory, easily customizable emails. 

Please keep in mind that I don't know how either will perform under LMCE since I have a dedicated virtual server setup for monitoring.  I do not have Zenoss running on my core or any MDs. LMCE is more that willing to give up the information that Zenoss is requesting so It should in theory work just fine when installed locally, providing your hardware can handle it.  It uses Mysql so you may want to pay extra attention to that, definitely backup the LMCE database first if you decide to try it. 

[dextaslab81]

I'm using MRTG; yeah it's a little harder to setup, but it's also less system resource hungry, and comes with indexmaker to make a basic index.html for viewing the graphs in a browser.

Cacti also gives similar graphs (RRDTool back end), I believe it uses sql database, not flat file.

[tmwillett]

Thanks for the info.  I haven't noticed any of those discrepancies that you noted, but I will be on the look out for them.  My system is still in the development stage, as I want to work out the bugs BEFORE the wife and kids start to use it.  So far, it's looking very promising.