
Follow-up on "Linux server monitoring tools" - adionditsak
http://aarvik.dk/linux-monitoring-tools-suggestions-from-hacker-news/
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wpietri
From the description of linux-dash:

> It is easily extensible from its architecture which just calls the php
> exec() function and sends it to an ajax request.

I presume the network police have already revoked somebody's license to run a
server, yeah?

~~~
adionditsak
I also believe that exec() is not dangerous if you use it right, and if your
www-data/apache-user do not got any sudo rights to risk someone to take
advantage of your machine. This have been proved from various sources, if i
know right. I understand it can be a security hole if you let the user write
anything, but this is eg. not the case with Linux-dash.

~~~
dijit
local shell is as good as root as far as I'm concerned.

especially if that machine is single purpose, which most of mine are.

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zimbatm
Widening the net a bit but since you added network-connected monitoring, check
out sensu. It's backward-compatible with nagios plugins and handles cloud
systems very well (no need to restart the server every time a host is being
added/removed). It's also capable of extracting system metrics and forward
them to graphite/... . Really great tool.

And just for metrics, collectd is great too.

~~~
adionditsak
Nice zimbatm, i will definitely take a look at those :-) Sounds great with
Nagios + cloud systems integration.

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nteon
I use [https://github.com/bpowers/psm](https://github.com/bpowers/psm) every
day at this point. Simple, fast and filterable memory reporting. disclaimer: I
also wrote it.

~~~
23arboo
I am using PSM quite frequently too. Thanks for the library.

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kaivi
Is there a nice open-source solution for monitoring multiple servers? I don't
want a separate http daemon on every one of them, just so I can log in there
occasionally. It would be most helpful to have a separate server, which will
collect data and logs from all of my other machines, through a lightweight
network interface. SMS/E-mail notifications and a tray app for Mac won't hurt
either.

There is always AWS, but for my side projects, I prefer cheaper VPS.

~~~
lil_cain
More than you can shake a stick at.

For graphing: Munin, Cacti, Graphite, and ganglia are the normal options.
Graphite is the most powerful of these. It doesn't do any actual monitoring
though. Munin is the simplest to implement.

For general monitoring and alerting: Nagios (and its clones: Shinken, Icinga,
and Naemon) is the standard. There's also newer projects like reconnoiter
(which suffers from awful documentation, but looks like it could be really
nice), and Sensu (who's got quite a bit more documentation than reconnoiter,
and looks like it could be quite good). A reasonable number of people use
Zabbix as well - the main benefit of this seems to be a nice GUI for
management (but I've never used it, so take my comment with a pinch of salt).
Graphs (and almost anything you want) can generally be added to nagios and
clones if you're willing to do a little work. Reconnoiter seems to have graphs
out of the box. I don't know about zabbix or sensu.

There's more tools that you can use for log monitoring - I think that's a
whole separate area, but if you're interested, ping me and I can point you in
the direction of the right tools :-)

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atmosx
I'm writing a ruby script to gather statistics from a Raspberry Pi. All the
projects I've seen so far rely on Perl/Python/PHP scripts which are executing
shell commands to extract informations every X minutes.

I wonder, isn't there some sort of API to access in Unix-based systems data
like CPU usage, memory usage, etc in a more natural way?

~~~
dsr_
Why, yes, there is.

Go run strace on ps or top and see what they call.

I'll save you some time: it turns out to be stat() and open() on things in
/proc.

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rjzzleep
i know this is much easier to use, and arguably looks much better. but maybe
for more serious use maybe consider using munin [1] or cacti? [2]

[1] [http://munin-monitoring.org/](http://munin-monitoring.org/)

[2]
[http://cacti.net/screenshots.php?page=1](http://cacti.net/screenshots.php?page=1)

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ergo14
We have plans to add (free) server monitoring to App Enlight. I would be more
than delighted for you guys to comment here:

[https://github.com/AppEnlight/main/issues/29](https://github.com/AppEnlight/main/issues/29)

and tell us what you would like to see.

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nppc
Can Linux-Dash provide with a history of CPU load , memory etc or does it only
provide the current stats ?

~~~
adionditsak
Only current data. It is a very simple tool. If you clone it to your Web
server it should work already, if you want to test it.

