[ILUG] system monitoring and logging s/w

[Chris Higgins]

> Hiya,
> 
> I'm looking for some software to measure and log the performance of a linux
> server. I know there are a variety of tools available, but is there anything
> that will pull them altogether, and hopefully generate viewable statistics?
> 
> The main purpose of this is to identify bottle necks for a system, and also
> to see how a particular system is coping within a load balanced network.
> Particular items I'm looking for are:

You've got two problems - data generation, and data graphing... 
If you separate them out like that - the problem becomes
fairly simple..

graphing etc.. - MRTG or RRDtool

The issue then becomes a matter of data generation, and then its
a case of running an agent on the machines which gets the info
you want - that way the impact can be tuned on a per machine basis.

That agent might be a cron job that runs once a minute to dump 
stats from various commands (vmstat etc) to 

If you look at rrdtool, there are a range of front ends that
do the polling some of which are network focused, and some of
which are host focused - a quick peek on the rrdtool site
lists HotSanic  - which claims to focus on system side of things.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/rrdworld/hotsanic.html

Then again, if you've got a good SNMP agent available on the machine,
you can just poll it from which ever device is doing your graphing.
> 
> cpu load, usage, idle time etc... 
> memory/swap usage
> disk i/o
> (network traffic maybe)
> ability to track specific processes/programs to identify their cpu and mem
> usages.
> 
> all of this preferably in graph format, and with a configurable time period
> - 5 mins to 5 weeks etc... (every sec to every 1/2 hour).
> 
> I know you can do all this manually, but I need something that will run in
> the background and you can look at the report at the end of a 1 hour test or
> at the end of a weeks standard usage.
> 
> Being as unobtrusive as possible, to the system's performance, is of course
> a must. It would also be nice to have as much data logged as possible, so
> that you can rearrange the production of stats reports if required. It's
> fine for the program to run on the server itself (even preferable, to reduce
> network load), just as long as the data generated can be retrieved.
> 
> It doesn't have to be GPL (but it would be nice), so any good commercial
> options can also be considered.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Having looked at http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Monitoring/Load/, and
> browsed a bit, nothing as really struck me yet as being what I need.
> 
> THANKS!
> 
> Tim
> 
> -- 
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-- 
** Chris Higgins                         e: chris.higgins at horizon.ie **
**                                       tel: +353-1-6204916            **
** Horizon Technical Services            fax: +353-1-6204901            **