Russell Adams <address@hidden> writes:
[About a Central monit app]
Depends on how complex you want monit to get. With a central server
administrating remote systems over the network, you get network
security issues.
My first impulse is to use rsync or CVS in the "gold server" mentality
to push out configs. As far as start/stop/restart multiple machines, with
proper ACL's on the local monit webserver, you could use wget from a
single central machine to script remote actions.
An aggregate status for all monits would be a useful feature, but I
would consider it redundant to the other applications I use to monitor
uptimes and statistics on all of my machines (Nagios, cricket).
Perhaps a central monitoring/management app would simply build on your
integrated webserver commands. That'd be neat. ;]
Oddly enough, I'll be using monit to ensure Nagios is always
running. I crashed Netsaint once with a bogus plugin... ;] Hence my
paranoia.
Along the thought of a central machine, I think toward a plugin for
Nagios to query the status of monit on a machine. But then I'm just a
Nagios buff.
To elaborate, I use Nagios and SNMP/NSClient/NRPE to check on critical
processes on remote machines, but only to alert others to the
problems. Not all the machines could run monit (windoze :P), but those
that could would save me time and bandwidth by having a single plugin
call monit and verify everything is running ok, or monit reporting in
via submitting a passive critical service check when there is a
problem that it can't resolve.
These arguments got me thinking. I originally proposed a central monit
app, because the idea looked neat and because it seemed like a natural
evolution for monit and also because monit will easily integrate with
such an application. In fact, a central application would be so fun
and easy to write (at least in theory) that it's almost a shame not to.
But I realize that such a central monit application is only going to
part of a niche which is already pretty crowded with programs like Big
Brother, Nagios and others and as Mr. Adams was saying:
I'm not sure I'd even use a central monitoring app for monit. ;]
That's it, for a central monit app. to actually be interesting for
users it must do what I previously outlined but it must also implement
all the other stuff found in those other programs and even after all
this work it's probably *not* going to "succeed" because users are
already using (religiously) those other well established monitoring
applications. In other words is it worth the effort? I think not, or
at least I'm in doubt.
And as
Martin suggested if someone wants to, it's actually very easy to
create a pluggin for monit for those central monitoring applications.
(I'm not going to do it, since I'm a not big fan of any off those
systems, to put to mildly)
I have also started to have doubts about the need for a central
configuring system for monit (i.e. configure monit from ldap), rsync
for instance can probably do the job easily or what do you think,
Martin?