Pablumfication

Recently I have been checking out a number of different solutions for monitoring remote servers and alerting or warning depending on certain metrics. For this I have looked at a number of different solutions including Server Density, Cloudkick, Cacti, Nagios and some others. Each of these has various advantages and disadvantages.Which I will give a very brief run down of below.

Server Density
The Good

• iPhone Application
• Push Notifications for iPhone Application
• Easy to Deploy Agent

The Bad

• Costs Per Server for Full Version
• Limited Services it can monitor.

Cloudkick
The Good

• Incredibly easy to setup monitoring of multiple hosts if your with one of the supported providers. I was using vps.net when I tried them out and it worked very well.
• Very good metric monitoring.
• Very nice interface.

The Bad

• Limited to monitoring of supported providers.
• Need to hand over API key for it to work.
• In my opinion incredibly expensive.

Cacti
The Good

• SNMP Integration
• Great Interface
• Very good metric support
• Cost – Free

The Bad

• Not Really a Remote Monitoring Solution as does not provide alerting. I know that it was never designed to be but definitely has potential to be expanded on.

Nagios
The Good

• Highly Configurable
• Support for Custom Monitoring Scripts
• Great Alerting Configuration
• Cost – Free

The Bad

• Complicated to configure even for basic monitoring
• Runs on single host meaning all network monitoring lost of host goes down.

Since none of the above solutions exactly suite my needs I have decided to produce my own monitoring solution. To do this I am going to take advantage of the fact that phpSysInfo provides the majority of the statistics that I wish to monitor and I already run it on most of my servers. phpSysInfo can supply its data in XML form this is that data I can use for monitoring.
So I plan to develop my own solution in Python to read the XML data from multiple remote hosts and then take a defined action if a rule is matched. Since I needed a name for this project I decided to call it SysInfoRM or System Information Remote Monitor.

Here is the basic feature plans for now

Initial Release Features for SysInfoRM

• Parsing of 1 – n XML from either phpSysInfo or pySysInfo (Since it can supply data in same XML format and should be good for remote monitoring of non web hosts).
• Ability to define monitoring rules and actions for when they are matched.
• Easy / Understandable Configuration.
• Heart Beat Monitoring of Script Itself. Basically run the script in two locations if the Primary fails the other should take over the monitoring.
• Can be run as a Daemon or as interactive script.

Future Planned Features for SysInfoRM

• Curses interface for viewing and configuration.
• Web interface for viewing and configuration.

Python Libraries

• urllib2
• smtplib

I am hoping to have something working in the next couple of days just need to get my Python skills up to scratch. I am going to attempt to incorporate all the best bits from the other currently available monitoring tools and as few of the bad bits as possible. I should also mention I was inspired by and am drawing on another good monitoring script from the tomubuntu blog. Tom has done a really good job with this script and I suggest people check it out its a good simple script that can monitor Load Average, Memory and other stats; it can then alert using sSMTP.

That is all for now please check back soon I’ll be providing updates on the progress of SysInfoRM as I develop it and will post the SVN or Git Repos once I get one set up.