Projects - Spong
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Spong is a network monitoring
system which I quite like. It is written in Perl and is quite easy to
extend.
spong-client plugins
I have a plugin I've written. It should be installed into
lib/Spong/Client/plugins on the machine you want to monitor on.
It has POD documentation describing the configuration requirements.
- check_realserver
- Checks the health of a RealServer running
on the local machine
using rssm.
Currently is known to work against RealServer v4, as that is what
we're running. May work against v9 which is the latest version, but
no idea. I don't have access to a v9 server.
spong-network plugins
I have a couple of plugins I've written. These should be installed into
lib/Spong/Network/plugins on the machine you're running
spong-network. They all have POD documentation describing the
configuration requirements.
- check_insight
- Check the health of Compaq boxes using the Compaq Insight Management
System. At my current job we don't have any Compaq's, so I haven't
touched this since about August 2000.
- check_mysql
- Modification of Miles Lott's check_mysql. This one allows you to
define the username and password to use on a host by host basis
(as well as having defaults). It also now has POD documentation.
- check_nut
- Checks the health of UPS's that are monitored using
NUT.
spong-rrd extensions
I've extended spong-rrd to add some more features that I'm interested in.
I'll submit the patches to Stephen soon, or since a new modular spong-rrd
is on it's way I might wait until then. Any how, my spong-rrd is
here. It adds:
- Sort the main page of hosts (having 75 hosts unsorted is a pain!).
- Each page of graphs now has an Expires tag - no more hitting reload
when you go back to the page. (Unsupported by some browsers... Doesn't
appear to work for mine. Looks like it's caching the images.)
- Generates graph pages for some new modules (listed below).
- Rejigging of format of index page for each host. To make it a little
bit nicer for the extra modules.
- Removed the 7th colour, it was to similar to the 2nd color (both
dark blue). I have some machines with lots of drives.
New spong-rrd modules I've written. These should be installed into
lib/Spong/plugins on the machine you're running
spong-server.
- data_rrd_mysql
- Take some of the numbers from check_mysql above and graph them.
Namely, the number of threads, tables and if available the average
number of queries. Although on my systems that support the average
number of queries (MySQL >= 3.23) it seems to stay pretty static.
- data_rrd_ping
- Take the minimum, maximum and average ping times from check_ping
and graph them. Since the default is to only send out 2 pings
it's debateable how useful it is to graph all 3. Oh well...
- data_rrd_realserver
- Take the number of players listening to each live stream on a
RealServer and graph them. Uses data from check_realserver.
Tools
I'm in the process of writing some other tools to be used in conjunction
with Spong.
POE Spong Bot
This is a complete rewrite of Thomas Bader's
Spong-Bot.
I had an idea of writing a real time ticker feed from Spong into an IRC
channel about the middle of July. After a little searching I found
Spong-Bot, installed it, had a little play and decided it didn't work how
I wanted things to work. As I was starting to rewrite it be a real time
feeder I discovered the wonderful world of POE,
an event driven Perl environment. This made life much easier.
So now, POE Spong Bot is a real time alert ticker, feeding alerts into a
channel on your IRC server. You can also ask it questions about servers,
and also fetch a full summary of all servers being monitored.
We've now been using it internally for the last month and it works quite
nicely. I need to add some security to it and some documentation, but
I plan on relasing it soon.
As of 2003/04/29 we've been using it internally for over 6 months. There
are a couple of issues that have cropped up, but they've all been fixed in
my almost complete rewrite. I'm going to finish some other new features
that I want and then I'll release it.
As of 2003/12/29 I'm still working quietly on the rewrite, I haven't touched
it for a months since I've been playing with
Dashboard.
SNMP Trap Receiver
Have SNMP devices on your network? Don't have HP Openview or anything
else which can handle SNMP Traps nicely? Well, neither do I. I've had
a look at what else is out there, and none of them really solve my problem.
I'm currently writing a program which accept traps and pretty format them
and then feed them to Spong or a user defined program. At this stage it
is mostly working, just tweaking is needed. Then of course I want to test
it in a live environment (ie, work).
I also plan on having it tied into POE Spong Bot so you can ask it questions
about SNMP capable devices... Also need a name...
2005/01/12 - Well, the code was lost when a machine was rebuilt and I
no longer have the need for this. So .