[ILUG] system monitoring and logging s/w

[Ciaran Treanor]

On Tue, 2002-01-08 at 15:10, McAuley, Tim wrote:
> Hmmm... already use that for network monitoring the cisco router here.

Hmmm... great!

> Not sure if it'll give me enough information, and then there's the
overhead
> of using snmp. These servers are being tested for system that will
throttle
> them! So they need to be streamlined as much as possible.

For type of things you're talking about (cpu load, memory usage etc.)
MRTG is perfecty suited. If you're going to monitor lots of hosts
then you should have a reasonable machine to run MRTG and Apache on.
You should also make sure it's reasonable close to the machines
you're interested in monitoring.

You also have to remember that you're probably not going to need to
poll these machines more than a couple of times an hour so the
load of using SNMP will negligible. Regardless of whether you use
MRTG or not, SNMP should probably be part of your solution.

A decent SNMP agent will make it possible to execute a script (or
whatever) on the target machine whenever a particular MIB variable
is read. This will obviously generate a load on the target, but
as with all monitoring there's a compromise between the frequency
of updates and the load you're imposing.

Ciaran T