document updated 16 years ago, on Feb 11, 2008
A tool that is very flexible on the back-end (eg. is able to check arp, icmp, dhcp, http, possibly
track average response times, etc), but synthesizes it and presents a succinct display of what's
responding as expected, and what's not.
There are different genres of server monitors:
- more or less instantaneous data: just track what's working right this second, and display it (basically no state; more suitable to a dynamic lab environment, where you're just trying to have a bird's eye view on things as they rapidly change)
- longer-term tracking: display reponse-time changes over time; when something goes down, email/SMS/klaxon (more suitable for stable setups that are expected to have high-uptime)
I'm personally interested in the former.
Some of the complexity comes in when you want them to be able confirm that the service is fully
available, so they sometimes need to support a wider range of services:
- can programs still make a connection to your database?
- are players still able to login to your game server?
- are your HTTP caches returning pages in a timely manner (while differentiating between a normal page and an error page)?
Also, obviously, it's often useful to have a highly-functional GUI so that you can "drill down"
and see a greater amount of detail whenever that's needed, while displaying a nice summary by
default.
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