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mark newnham at HZBNO05A MAN - GBGMT000 (mark.newnham@grandmet.co.uk)
Wed, 17 Apr 1996 09:02:05 EDT

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Michael,

I've just been through the same exercise, and an interesting learning
experience it is....

Depending on what type of machine you are monitoring it might be
possible that you dont have to install anything at all, I monitor
HP-UX and SCO. The HP is good, the SCO is poor. Some things you can do
are

1) syslogd monitoring. I use this for practically everything custom, I
monitor things like oracle log files and edi transfers. The HP itself
also sends all the kernel messages to syslog, You can use the logger
command or write C programs with the <syslog.h> library (very easy).
To make best use of this get the replacement syslogd for scotty, this
lets you monitor events by level facility etc.

2) SNMP monitoring. I use this for disk space monitoring on the HPs.
Scotty create a very useful stripchart with the ability to set
thresholds. I make my system beep when I get short of space. I think
you can do a lot more on SUN systems.

3) RPC.rstat monitoring. I use this for monitoring cpu usage, system
load, disk activity, and interfaces. Scotty does very nice little
graphs for this.

Hope this helps, If anyone knows anything else easily monitored on
systems let me know...

I'm sure that there must be more, but this is the free and easy stuff.

Mark Newnham
Haagen-Dazs
Paris