EzDevInfo.com

Shinken - Anyone using it? [closed]

I've recently discovered Shinken, which is a new implementation of Nagios using python. Shinken "divides" Nagios in 5 different types of daemons, each one performing separated tasks. I haven't tried it yet but for what I've seen the whole architecture idea seems great to me (it works the Unix way: one process, one task), but the project seems a little "green" yet.

So, has anyone tried Shinken? What's your opinion?

Network Traffic Monitoring

What is the best tool to monitor/analyze network traffic on an entire network (several subnets)?

I'm looking for something that will help me toubleshoot bandwidth problems when, for instance, users start complaining that the "network is slow"

Enable Ping in Windows Server Firewall?

I've just installed Windows Server 2008 on a server and I'm able to connect through Remote Desktop but can't ping. Do I need to open an special port on the firewall to be able to ping a server?

What exactly do the colors in htop status bars mean?

By default, htop shows colored status bars for processors, memory, and swap. From left to right, the bars are colored green, blue, yellow, and red depending on some thresholds.

What does it mean when the Memory bar has a small level of green and blue, and almost all the remainder is yellow? The swap bar is empty. The color settings for htop are "default".

What tool do you use to monitor your servers?

For a more comprehensive list of monitoring tools and their features, check out this Wikipedia page.

As the question states, what are the most commonly used tools used for this task and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

Can anyone recommend a website monitoring service? [closed]

What are people using for website monitoring services?

I am referring to a service that I can configure specific hits to my site to monitor if the site is up, and how fast it is responding to the requests.

I am looking for an external service, that will hit my server from several locations, and will provide me notification if the site does not respond within certain tolerances.

It can be free or paid.

How to monitor a windows log file in real time? [closed]

There is a already question that asks about opening a large log files.

But my intention is different. Is there any application that monitors a log file and updates as it is updated in real time?

Platform: Windows XP/2003/2008 server

[Update] this is quite handy for a quick monitoring(thanks to Ckarras's answer)
Quick screen shot of PowerShell type -wait (type is an alias for get-content)

Best smartphone for sysadmins?

I need a cell phone that will help me keep an eye on my servers and services when I am away from my computer/desk/workplace.

Which smart phone would you recommend for sysadmins?

• An SSH client is a must.
• I haven't used an iPhone, but I guess having a keyboard would be better.

Currently I'm looking at this alternatives:

• iPhone would be the "default" smartphone.
• Nokia E71 has got good recommendations, including from Joel Spolky's.
• The Android platform looks good, but I'm not sure the few models (HTC G1 / HTC Magic / HTC Dream) are mature enough.
• I'm not sure about Blackberry.
• WinCE / Windows Mobile phones?
• Any Nokia phone better than an E71?

Which choice did you make? What would you recommend?

What are your most useful/valued Nagios plugins? [closed]

We're expanding our Nagios 3 setup, and are frequently coming across new NRPE or general Nagios plugins to test our existing infrastructure. This is in dribs and drabs though - it would be useful to get a summary of plugins that the Nagios users out there most value.

Please list a single plugin per post, preferably with a short description of why you love it and a link to the MonitoringExchange or plugin developer site. This way folk can vote for plugins already listed and we can see them in preferential order.

It would be better to not list plugins that others have already mentioned, for the same reason. If you have more to add regarding a plugin someone else has listed, please leave a comment to their answer.

Thanks!

Monitor an incoming SSH session in real time

Is there any linux software to monitor an incoming ssh session. At a previous job I was told that if you ever needed support from Red Hat for example you could have them SSH into your machine and you could watch what they were doing.

I'm in a similar situation where I want to ssh into my friends machine to help him out but I want him to be able to watch what I'm doing for educational purposes and to ensure I don't do anything malicious.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

A better "top" command for Mac OS X? [closed]

The top command on OS X is pretty crappy.. The one included with most Linux distros allows you to change the sort-by column using < and >, there is a coloured mode (by pressing the z key), and a bunch of other useful options.

Is there a replacement command line tool? Ideally I would like htop for OS X, but because it relies on the /proc/ filesystem (see this thread) it has not been ported (and probably will never be)

The obvious answer is "Activity Monitor", but I'm looking for a command line tool!

Get notification from supervisord when a job exits

Is there any way supervisord can automatically restart a failed/exited/terminated job and send me a notification email with a dump of the last x lines of log file?

What is the difference between OpenTSDB and Graphite?

As far as I can tell, here are the main differences:

1. OpenTSDB does not deteriorate data over time, unlike Graphite where the size of the database is pre-determined.
2. OpenTSDB can store metrics per second, as opposed to Graphite which has minute intervals (I'm not sure of this, Graphite docs show retention policies which stores metrics every minute, but I don't know if this is the minimum unit of time we can play with)

I want to make an informed decision about which tool to use in order to store metrics, have I missed any other differences in these 2 systems? How performant/scalable are they?

Bonus Question: Is there any other time series system I should look at?

monit: check process without pidfile

I'm looking for a way to kill all processes with a given name that have been running for more than X amount of time. I spawn many instances of this particular executable, and sometimes it goes into a bad state and runs forever, taking up a lot of cpu.

I'm already using monit, but I don't know how to check for a process without a pid file. The rule would be something like this:

kill all processes named xxxx that have a running time greater than 2 minutes

How would you express this in monit?

Colorize Monitoring of Logs

I sometimes monitor apache and php error logs using tail under FreeBSD. Is there any way to get colorized output, either using tail or some other command line app?

Alternatively, what is your favorite way to monitor the various web-related logs in realtime?