I need to check the disk space in a number of remote systems (Windows 2000) and have to sent a mail if the space is below a particular level. How can this be automated? What script can be used?
One option would be a system monitoring tool, such as Nagios.
Basically, what this will do is continually interrogate your systems, and alert you to anything you set it to (disk-space, CPU usage, page-faults, etc.). As a bonus you get a lovely web-based interface which lets you see your system status at a glance.
Note that you will need to enable remote WMI querying on each target system, or install an "agent" on each system.
Related
I need to monitor several Linux servers placed in a different location from my farm.
I have VPN connection to this remote location.
Internally I use Zenoss 4 to monitor the systems, I would like to use Zenoss to monitor remote systems too. For contract policy, I cannot use VPN connection for Zenoss data (e.g. SNMP or SSH).
What I created is a bunch of scripts that fetch desired data from remote systems to an internal server. The format of the returned data is one CVS per every location, containing data from all appliances placed in that location.
For example:
$ cat LOCATION_1/current/current.csv
APPLIANCE1,out_of_memory,no,=,no,3,-
APPLIANCE1,postgre_idle,no,=,no,3,-
APPLIANCE2,out_of_memory,no,=,no,3,-
APPLIANCE2,postgre_idle,no,=,no,3,-
The format of CVS is this one:
HOSTNAME,CHECK_NAME,RESULT_VALUE,COMPARE,DESIRED_VALUE,INFO
How can i integrate those data in Zenoss, as the machines were placed in the internal farm?
If it is necessary, I could eventually change the format of fetched data.
Thank you very much
One possibility is for your internal server that communicates with remote systems (let's call it INTERNAL1) to re-issue the events as SNMP traps (or write them to the rsyslog file) and then process them in Zenoss.
For example, the message can start with the name of the server: "[APPLIANCE1] Out of Memory". In the "Event Class transform" section of your Zenoss web interface (http://my_zenoss_install.local:8080/zport/dmd/Events/editEventClassTransform), you can transform attributes of incoming messages (using Python). I frequently use this to lower the severity of an event. E.g.,
if evt.component == 'abrt' and evt.message.find('Saved core dump of pid') != -1:
evt.severity = 2 # was originally 3, I think
For your needs, you can set the evt.device to APPLIANCE1 if the message comes from INTERNAL1, and contains [APPLIANCE1] tag as the message prefix, or anything else you want to use to uniquely identify messages/traps from remote systems.
I don't claim this to be the best way of achieving your goal. My knowledge of Zenoss is strictly limited to what I currently need to use it for.
P.S. here is a rather old document from Zenoss about using event transforms. Unfortunately documentation in Zenoss is sparse and scattered (as you may have already learned), so searching old posts and/or asking questions on the Zenoss forum may be necessary.
Simply you can deploy one collector in remote location, and you add that host into collector pool , you can monitor remote linux servers also
Further to my previous question, I find that I cannot use the GExpertsDebugWindow on a PC which did not previously have Delphi installed.
If I have the following (not unusal, so probably of interest to others) requirements, do I need to roll my own code or is there and existing and free solution?
Must be able to read acorss the network (i.e., PC 1 monitors PC 2's debug output) by specifying PC 2's IP address
If posible, I would like to be able to filter by process name
Thanks in advance for any help
Microsoft's DebugView tool has those features. It can display OutputDebugString output, even from remote systems. Depending on other factors, it can even install itself remotely.
Is there an application that is capable of monitoring AND logging information (to file) about another process (in particular IIS aspnet_wp.exe) like (in periods of time):
- memory usage of process
- cpu usage
Or maybe there is another way to monitor IIS process?
Thanks Pawel
You can check Process Monitor from Microsoft.
Process Monitor is an advanced
monitoring tool for Windows that shows
real-time file system, Registry and
process/thread activity. It combines
the features of two legacy
Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and
Regmon, and adds an extensive list of
enhancements including rich and
non-destructive filtering,
comprehensive event properties such
session IDs and user names, reliable
process information, full thread
stacks with integrated symbol support
for each operation, simultaneous
logging to a file, and much more.
One choice would be Process explorer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
You might want to look at the ANTS Performance and Memory Profilers from Red Gate. I'm using their memory profiler to track down some memory issues as I write this.
Pretty much any monitoring system or framework that allows custom checks is capable of this.
You write your check and just put an extra line in it to post/print/put something to a file of your choice.
I for example use sensu for which I wright custom checks in ruby.
So I can easily do something like
if %x[{ping]}
ok
%x[{ print ‘all is well’ > syslog]}
end
and similar to that you can do for most other monitoring systems like Nagios etc.
I am writing device software for a PC and for that, I want the PC to be usable as a device. When power is supplied, it should switch on without requiring to press the power button. There are power options in BIOS settings but it starts the PC only when its uncleanly shutdown. The other concern I have is how would unclean shutdown affect the hard disk, filesystem and the OS (XP or Linux).
What you need is another PC and one of these devices attached to it.
http://www.relaypros.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=NCD&Category_Code=RS-232_Relay_Boards&gclid=CMna8_yOo5wCFQxM5QodWjoflQ
What you do is send this some RS232 commands for a quick closure on one of the relays. The relay is connected to the Power On pins of the computer you want to control.
You possibly could find another relay contact closure for AC current that allows you to close a relay when AC is flowing, but you would only want to for a brief second.
Unsafe shut downs can be quite detrimental depending where the filesystem state is in. It would be quite hard on the hardware too.
There is also the alternative of booting from the network device. A quick search led to some information on wikipedia. Also, there is something related called preboot execution environment which seem to be something like what you are looking for.
Some software options - these aren't exactly what you asked for, but they might help
Mac OS X: In the energy saver control pane's options tab, select "Restart automatically after a power failue. shutdown -hu now should then bring the system down but give you 5 minutes to remove power to simulate a dirty shutdown, and have the computer reboot automatically when power is restored. It's a slightly dirty shutdown anyway, I think. (ie, it doesn't log you off first)
Windows:
I don't have a windows machine so I can't try this, but you used to be able to tell windows not to power down the computer when you select shut down, but rather to put it in a safe state and display "It is now safe to turn off your computer". Perhaps you could then remove the power and have the bios believe it was a non-clean shutdown, and turn the machine on again when power is restored. There are some instructions on how to do this in Windows Server 2003 at the bottom of this microsoft help document. This forum discussion seems to suggest it might work on XP.
Linux: Not sure about this one, but maybe this website can help.
I haven't tried any of these, so no guarantees that they'll work or work safely.
What, at a minimum, should an application health-monitoring system do for you (the developer) and/or your boss (the IT Manager) and/or the operations (on-call) staff?
What else should it do above the minimum requirements?
Is monitoring the 'infrastructure' applications (ms-exchange, apache, etc.) sufficient or do individual user applications, web sites, and databases also need to be monitored?
if the latter, what do you need to know about them?
ADDENDUM: thanks for the input, i was really looking for application-level monitoring not infrastructure monitoring, but it is good to know about both
Whether the application is running.
Unusual cpu/memory/network usage.
Report any unhandled exceptions.
Status of various modules (if applicable).
Status of external components (databases, webservices, fileservers, etc.)
Number of pending background tasks (if applicable).
Maybe track usage of the application and report statistics on most/less used functionalities so you know where optimizations are most beneficial.
The answer is 'it depends'. Why do you need to monitor? How large is your operations staff? Do you need reporting? What is the application environment? Who cares if the application fails? Who cares if an exception happens? Are any of the errors recoverable? I could ask questions like these for a long time.
Great question.
We've been looking for some application-level monitoring solution for our needs some time ago without any luck. Popular monitoring solution are mostly addressed to monitor infrastrcture and - in my opinion - they are too complicated for a requirements of most of small and mid-sized companies.
We required (mainly) following features:
alerts - we wanted to know about
incident as fast as possible
painless management - hosted service wouldbe
the best
visualizations - it's good to know what is going on and take some knowledge from the data
Because we didn't find suitable solution we started to write our own. Finally we've ended with up-and-running service called AlertGrid. (You can check it for free of course.)
The idea behind it is to provide an easy way to handle custom monitoring scenarios. Integration API is very simple (one function with two required parameters). At the momment we and others are using it for:
monitor scheduled tasks (cron jobs)
monitor entire application logic execution
alert on errors in applications
we are also working on examples of basic infrastructure monitoring using AlertGrid
This is such an open ended question, but I would start with physical measurements.
1. Are all the machines I think are hosting this site pingable?
2. Are all the machines which should be serving content actually serving some content? (Ideally this would be hit from an external network.)
3. Is each expected service on each machine running?
3a. Have those services run recently?
4. Does each machine have hard drive space left? (Don't forget the db)
5. Have these machines been backed up? When was the last time?
Once one lays out the physical monitoring of the systems, one can address those specific to a system?
1. Can an automated script log in? How long did it take?
2. How many users are live? Have there been a million fake accounts added?
...
These sorts of questions get more nebulous, and can be very system specific. They also usually can be derived reactively when responding to phsyical measurements. Hard drive fill up, maybe the web server logs got filled up because a bunch of agents created too many fake users. That kind of thing.
While plan A shouldn't necessarily be reactive, it is the way many a site setup a monitoring system.
Minimum: make sure it is running :)
However, some other stuff would be very useful. For example, the CPU load, RAM usage and (in multiuser systems) which user is running what. Also, for applications that access network, a list of network connections for each app. And (if you have access to client computer(s)) it would be cool to be able to see the 'window title' of the app - maybe check each 2-3 minutes if it changed and save it. Also, a list of files open by the application could be very useful, but it is not a must.
I think this is fairly simple - monitor so that you can be warned early enough before something goes wrong. That means monitor dependencies and the application itself.
It's really hard to provide specifics if you're not going to give details on the application you're monitoring, so I'd say use that as a general rule.
At a minimum you want to know that the system is healthy. This is subjective in what defines your system is healthy. Is it computers are up, the needed resources exist, the data is flowing through the system, the data is properly producing results, etc, etc.
In my project we do monitoring of most of this and then some. It really comes down to what is the highest level that you can use to analyze that everything is working. In our case we need to know down to the data output. If you just need to know down to the are these machines up it saves you on trying to show an inexperienced end user what is wrong.
There are also "off the shelf" tools that will do a lot of the hard work for you if you are just looking too hard into data results. I particularly liked Nagios when I was looking around but we needed more than it could easily show so I wrote our own monitoring system. Basically we also watch for "peculiarities" in the system, memory / cpu spikes, etc...
thanks everyone for the input, i was really looking for application-level monitoring not infrastructure monitoring, but it is good to know about both
the difference is:
infrastructure monitoring would be servers plus MS Exchange Server, Apache, IIS, and so forth
application monitoring would be user machines and the specific programs that they use to do their jobs, and/or servers plus the data-moving/backend applications that they run to keep the data flowing
sometimes it's hard to draw the line - an oversimplified definition might be "if your team wrote it, it's an application; if you bought it, it's infrastructure"
i think in practice it is best to monitor both
What you need to do is to break down the business process of the application and then have the software emit events at major business components. In addition, you'll need to create end to end synthetic transactions (eg. emulating end users clicking on a website). All that data would be fed into an monitoring tool. In the past, I've done JMX for applications of which flowed into Tivoli Monitoring's JMX Adapter and then I've done scripts that implement a "fake user" and then pipe in the results into Tivoli Monitoring's Script Adapter. Tivoli Monitoring takes the data and then creates application health and performance charts from that raw data.