Linux Systems Management Applications | Linux System Monitoring Applications
Introduction
Tap In Systems’ Cloud Management Service manages Linux systems and applications by performing service checks and sending status and performance event data to the Tap In Management Server, where it is stored in a MySQL database. Users then can access this monitoring data, conduct analyses, and perform actions using Tap In’s viewer applications – the Tap In QuickView client, the Tap In Web application, and Tap In desktop widgets.
External Checks
Users can perform two types of service checks: external and internal. External checks are executed on the Tap In Management Server and test services that are available over the Internet. External checks include:
- HTTP/HTTPS
- Ping
- TCP port
- SNMP polls
- Web service calls
Since external checks don’t depend on internal infrastructure, they are useful for testing services as your customers or end users would see them. The external checks are configured using a Web interface on the Tap In Management Server.
Internal Checks
Internal checks are performed on the Linux system. They interact directly with the OS to gather information, then format and send the resulting events to the Tap In Management Server. Internal checks include:
- CPU
- Load
- Disk space
- Memory
- Swap
- System and application log files
Internal checks are executed from Tap In’s Linux agent. Distributed as open source, the agent is a Perl script which executes individual checks, interprets the results, creates a Tap In event, and then sends the event to the Tap In Management Server in the cloud. The checks to execute and their parameters, such as alerting thresholds, are defined in a configuration file. The agent is typically scheduled using crontab.
Integrating with Third Party Tools
If you already are using a tool to monitor some or all of your Linux systems and want to expand or enhance your capability using Tap In, you may choose to integrate your existing tool rather than replace it. The following examples describe how you would do this with Nagios, Big Brother and Ganglia:
- Nagios. Tap In’s Nagios integration module is an event handler that is called by Nagios whenever a Nagios state change occurs, then sends the event to the Tap In server.
- Big Brother. Tap In’s Big Brother integration module that reads the Big Brother status logs and sends update events to the Tap In Management Server.
- Ganglia. Ganglia is a high performance metric gathering tool used in grid computing. Tap In can read Ganglia’s state information to create Tap In events. This avoids the overhead of executing individual scripts.
Generating Reports and Graphs
If performance information is presented to the Tap In Management Server, Tap In will store the information in either its internal database or in Round Robin Databases. Tap In can then generate graphs on this data, as shown below. This is an easy method of graphing any metric that needs tracking. Similar reports are available to show aggregated metric information. For example, Tap In can generate a graph to show average Load utilization across a group of Linux servers.
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