Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 13:43:10 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Anton Yuzhaninov <citrin@citrin.ru> Cc: cvs-src@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re[2]: cvs commit: src/etc/defaults periodic.conf Message-ID: <20060131133854.V95776@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <1881677654.20060131162438@citrin.ru> References: <200601301233.k0UCXiKq085748@repoman.freebsd.org> <20060130123525.GD83922@FreeBSD.org> <20060130215816.GC91655@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20060130235717.J95776@fledge.watson.org> <1881677654.20060131162438@citrin.ru>
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On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Anton Yuzhaninov wrote:
> RW> My daily script parsers certainly aren't. I quite like being able to pull in
> RW> a mailbox of old daily output and plot disk space use over time.
>
> For automated monitoring better (and more safe in case of changing daily
> mail output) to use SNMP based tools like nagios, zabbix, remstats, cacti...
>
> Daily mail more useful for human reading.
Actually, the daily (etc) script output proves to be a very reliable and
useful way to manage long-term monitoring. The format is generally consistent
(xcept when commits like the one that spawned this thread happen), and the
logs are easily kept locally or reliably sent over the network. If the
network is down, sendmail happily spools the output for later delivery, it can
be sent to multiple recipients without special tools, and so on. I recognize
the usefulness of SNMP, but think SNMP is a tool you use to support things
like long-term monitoring, not the presentation piece itself. One of the
nicest things about the periodic scripts is that they require literally zero
configuration -- you don't have to set up daemons, manage keying material,
maintain additional packages, etc. With recent bsnmp work, SNMP has become a
lot more capable of monitoring the interesting things about FreeBSD, but it's
still not what I'm actually looking for.
I don't know if anyone has written it yet, but it would be quite neat to have
an SNMP-driven implementation of {top, netstat, ps, df, ifconfig} that can be
easily pointed at bsnmpd on local or remote machines. That way you get the
current UNIX management interface, which is well-understood and easily
scripted, with a distributed back-end.
Robert N M Watson
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