SUMMARY: system monitoring

From: Mariela Esser-Jaime (esser@parc.xerox.com)
Date: Wed Oct 07 1992 - 00:21:51 CDT


ORIGINAL POSTING
----------------
Can you recommend a comprehensive system monitoring package/program?
We have over 20 Sun file servers storing close to 200 GBytes of data. I want to be able to closely monitor these servers in the most efficient way.

I would like to be the first one to know when a server has crashed, or when it is hang due to an overload, etc.
Right now I am running different scripts to check for high disk capacity, and a variety of errors (mem, read) from the messages files. I also check for abrupt load changes.

An answer would be to use Watcher (which I recently got off the net). For this I would need a list of what to check for (i.e., load, swap, disk-usage, errors in /var/adm/messges, is the server up?). What else?

If you know of any package I can buy or get off the net, or if you are running Watcher and have already gone through this process and written a bunch of scripts, please let me know.

SUMMARY OF RESPONSES
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Given the topic, I thought I was going to get hundreds of messages. I was surprised I got few responses, most of which were asking for a summary...

A few people use watcher pretty much the same way I do: keeping an eye on system load, partitions with high % of capacity, host up/down, etc..
Andy Feldt sent me a very good message with examples of his use of Watcher. Special thanks.

Mike Raffety recommended 'sysmon' from BALR Corporation. I am getting a 30-day evaluation copy. According to their VP of Business Development (Ronald Rice) sysmon is exactly what I need.

There were also a couple of suggestions to use Sun Net Manager, or Sharpshooter, both of which I had looked into, but thought were overkill. I plan on re-evaluating.

Thanks to:
---------
feldt@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu
tim@otis.hssc.scarolina.ed
sitongia@ncar.ucar.edu
era@niwot.scd.ucar.edu
miker@sbcoc.com
terralyn@solum.cor2.epa.gov
birger@vest.sdata.n
Hugo.Tafel@west.sun.com
heiser@tdw901.ed.ray.com
davis@udecc.engr.udayton.edu
cyerkes@jpmorgan.com
ups!upstage!glenn@fourx.aus.sun.com
ups!kevin@fourx.aus.sun.com
mawa@sun9.ruf.uni-freiburg.de
gls@cirrus.com

Mariela Esser-Jaime
(esser@parc.xerox.com)



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