everyday monitoring

[Greg Andrews]

"Joe Philip" <joe.philip@verizon.net> writes:

>
>I want to setup some monitoring on our Solaris 7 production servers. Can
>somebody tell me what I should monitor on everyday - I know I have to
>monitor /var/adm/messages. What else should I monitor?
>

What are your goals for monitoring? Do you want early warning of
problems that could cause service outages, like a filesystem filling
up, or the load average getting too high, or an important daemon
stopped accepting connections?

Do you want to log the status of the things you monitor, so you can
go back after a crash and do a post-mortem analysis of how things
were doing shortly before the crash?

Do you want to be able to create charts and stats of your servers'
overall workload, so you can report to your boss, and plan upgrades
before the increasing loads cause trouble?


-Greg
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[Lon Stowell]

Joe Philip wrote:

> I want to setup some monitoring on our Solaris 7 production servers. Can
> somebody tell me what I should monitor on everyday - I know I have to
> monitor /var/adm/messages. What else should I monitor?
>
>

It would probably be a good idea to go over to a big white board
and write down everything that these servers do.

Then for each thing the servers do, what are the most important
items in the server environment for that particular set of tasks.
e.g. [by no means complete, but I charge by the hour for this
under normal circumstances]

Disk space
Response time
Bulletproof reliability even if it causes poor response time
Process space
Memory
Login events
Mail events
Unusual penetration events
Network events
Storage subsystem events
current, peak and average load for anything of interest and general
trend of same

Then make the most important entry: Identify the meanest and nastiest
corporate officer(s) and find out what applications are their hot
buttons.

[Barton Fisk]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:37:20 GMT, Lon Stowell <lon.stowell@comcast.net>
wrote:

> Joe Philip wrote:
>

>> I want to setup some monitoring on our Solaris 7 production servers. Can
>> somebody tell me what I should monitor on everyday - I know I have to
>> monitor /var/adm/messages. What else should I monitor?
>>
>>

>
> It would probably be a good idea to go over to a big white board
> and write down everything that these servers do.
>

Infomercial here:

We have been happily using Big Brother for about 3 years now. The "roll
your own" version is basically free. There is a ton of setup, but the
flexibility is worth it. Heck, you can even monitor Windoze, if you really
have the need. Your mileage may vary, caveat emptor.

[url]http://www.bb4.com[/url]

End of infomercial.

- Barton Fisk, SCNA SCSA

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