Devmon, version 0.2
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This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version. Please see the file named
'COPYING' that was included with the distrubition for more details.
Thanks!
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First off, let me thank, in no particular order, the people
that have helped make Devmon what it is today:
Henrik Stoerner
Steve Aiello
Dan Vande More
Craig Boyce
What is Devmon?
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Devmon is a Perl script that can monitor a large number of
remote devices and report problems back to a display server
running either the BigBrother or Hobbit monitoring software.
How does Devmon work?
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Devmon uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to
obtain the necessary information from remote hosts. Right
now, Devmon only supports SNMP versions 1 and 2c (v3 support
might be added at a later date).
Devmon determines which hosts to query based on information
from the display server's bb-hosts file, which allows you
to manage all of your monitoring facilities from a single file.
Devmon can either run in a single-node configuration, a
single machine does all of the work and reports back to the
test server (Devmon can even be run ON the test server, for
small networks), or Devmon can be run in a multi-node cluster.
A multi-node Devmon installation is considerably more
powerful than a single-node one, as it allows you to query
more hosts on a more timely basis, and it gives you automatic
load balancing, node failure failover and scalability. The
downside, though, is that it is more complicated than a single
node server, as it requires you to maintain a MySQL server,
which is what the multi-node cluster uses as a backend for
data storage.
What are Devmon's prerequisites?
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In order for Devmon to do anything useful, you will need
a machine capable of running the Perl interpreter, which
is used to execute the Devmon code.
In addition, you will need a machine (either the same machine
running Devmon, or a different one) runing either the Hobbit
or BigBrother monitoring program, which displays the messages
that Devmon generates.
Finally, you will need your to have your Hobbit or BigBrother
program set up to monitor at least one host that Devmon has
a template for. Only then will Devmon be able to poll a
remote host and display the results. For more information on
Devmon's template system, please consult the TEMPLATES file
located in the docs directory.
How do I install Devmon?
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Detailed instructions are available in the docs/INSTALLATION
file. A single-node installation merely requires you to untar
the Devmon tarball to a suitable location, modify the config
file appropriately, and start the Devmon daemon.
A multi-node installation requires you to do all of the above
on each node in the cluster, as well as set up a MySQL database
to facilitate communication between nodes.
What are Devmon templates?
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Devmon can monitor a virtually unlimited number of different
device types, by allowing a user to define a template for
each test to be conducted on a particular device type.
For instance, a 'cpu' test on a Cisco 2950 switch is its own
template, while a 'if_load' test on the same switch is an
entirely different template. For more on template creation
and modification, please see the docs/TEMPLATES file.
What kind of devices can Devmon monitor?
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Basically, any device that supports SNMP v1 or v2c can be
monitored by Devmon. Provided that you can determine which
SNMP OIDs (Object IDentifiers) you want to monitor on that
device, you can create your own Devmon template (provided
that a template of the same type doesnt already exist)
and Devmon will take care of the rest!
What type of hardware/software does Devmon require?
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To date, Devmon has been tested and is known to work
on Linux and FreeBSD. Devmon might also run on other
operating systems with little or no modification, if
you succeed at adapting Devmon to a new OS, please drop
the author a line and let him know of your success.
As for hardware, the requirements are entirely up
to how fast you want your collector to be able to run.
Obviously the machine needs to run an OS that can
run the Perl binary; but theoretically you could run
Devmon on a 386 with 8MB of memory.
$Id: README 96 2008-12-07 20:01:21Z buchanmilne $
