Mon is a tool for monitoring the availability of services. Services may be network-related, environmental conditions, or anything that can be tested with software. If a service is unavailable Mon can tell you with syslog, email, your pager or a script of your choice. You can control who gets each alert based on the time of day or day of week, and you can control how often an existing problem is re-alerted.
Mon was designed to be open in the sense that it supports arbitrary monitoring facilities and alert methods via a common interface, which are easily implemented through programs (in C, Perl, shell, etc.), SNMP traps, and special Mon (UDP packet) traps.
This tool is extremely useful for system administrators, but it also has wider uses. It was designed to be a general-purpose problem alerting system, separating the tasks of testing services for availability and sending alerts when things fail. To achieve this, “mon” is implemented as a scheduler which runs the programs which do the testing, and triggering alert programs when these scripts detect failure. Alerts can be controlled by a variety of “squelch” knobs, and complex dependencies can be configured to help suppress excessive alerts.
Key Features
- moncmd, which is a command-line client. moncmd supports the full functionality of the client/server interface.
- monshow, a dual command-line and CGI interface report generator for showing the operational status of the services monitored by the server. It displays nicely-formatted columnar output of the current operational status, groups, and the failure log.
- skymon, which is a SkyTel 2-Way paging interface, allows you to query the server’s state and to manipulate it in the same manner as moncmd, right from your pager. Access is controlled via a simple password and an access control file.
- mon.cgi, which is an interactive web interface, allows you to not only view status information, but to change parameters in the server while it is running.
Website: sourceforge.net/projects/mon
Support:
Developer: Jim Trocki, David Nolan, Ed Ravin, Jon Meek, Augie Schwer
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Mon is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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