[nycbug-talk] Monitoring programs

[Marc Spitzer]

On 8/20/05, Francisco Reyes <lists at natserv.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, Marc Spitzer wrote:
> 
> > And while rrd, cricket & smokeping etc, is way cool it does result in
> > data loss by design.
> 
> What do you mean? They only show the current status?

As far as I know they are all using a rrd(round robin database
backend) and that by design cosolidates data as part of its storagr
stratigy.  Good place to start:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/tut/rrdtutorial.en.html

> 
> > You may just want to stick data in postgress or
> > sqlite and crunch what you want out of it
> 
> Today is "learn mysql" day, but plan tomorrow to take a look at the
> mentioned packages.. although I am tempted to just capture the output of
> df, du and "w" for now and dump it into a PostgreSQL database for now..

If you know postgres, why play with mysql?

> until I really have time to go through each fo the packages people
> suggested.
> 
> Of the packages mentioned (criket, nagios, big brother) any suggestions as
> to which one is relatively easy AND secure?

I can not speak for the others but nagios, use 2.x on netbsd) does
have a learning curve, after you understand it it is not that bad to
add stuff.  Also if you want to log events to a db in 2.x you will
probablly need to write some scripts to log the info.  The db api was
yanked in 2.x, after reading the reasons I think this is a good thing
for the project.

marc