Tag: monitoring

What is Logwatch?

Logwatch is a log-monitoring system built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. By default, it sends a daily email to the root user that contains potentially important entries from the system logs, such as kernel errors, user authentication failures, sudo commands, and disk utilization.

The output of the logwatch report is sent to the root user by default, but can easily be forwarded to any email address by adding an alias for the root user: How do I configure an email alias for my root account on Linux?

What should I monitor on my Eclipse servers?

The basic elements that make up monitoring are:

  • Events: triggered when a set condition occurs
  • Threshold: the point on a scale that must be reached in order to trigger a response to an event. The response can be an alert, a notification, or a script being run.
  • Notification: how an administrator is informed that something (an event or a response) has occurred.
  • Health: a set of metrics that define the state of the functionality being monitored. The administrator defines the values that represent a “healthy” state for each of their components.

For your Eclipse environment, we recommend monitoring the following items where applicable and possible:

General Monitoring:

  • Availability (ping test)
  • CPU (high CPU threshold alerts, tracking historical trends)
  • Memory (high RAM threshold alerts, tracking historical trends)
  • Disk space (top utilization threshold alerts, tracking historical trends)
  • Hardware (failures, power loss, firmware events, etc.)

Database server:

  • UniVerse (process running, responsive, spooler status)
  • SYSTEM.ADMIN (process running)
  • SOCKET.PH.SERVER (process running, listening on port 22222)
  • VSIFAX (process running, responding, modems down)
  • JBoss (process running, listening on port 2080)
  • Samba shares (availability, read/write)
  • CUPS (print queue status)
  • Sendmail (service running, queue status)

Forms Server:

  • Windows share(s) (availability, read/write)
  • Formscape (availability of port or services running)
  • VSIFAX (services)

Imaging Server:

  • Windows share(s) (availability, read/write)

Internet Gateway Server:

  • IIS (service running, listening on ports 80 and/or 443)