Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

In cardiovascular terms, the drop in heart rate from 1000 steps/day to 2000 steps/day is significant: a full 3 bpm decrease. And as step count increases, resting heart rate steadily drops—until you reach about 5000 steps per day. After that—6000, 7000, even up to 10,000 steps—the curve flattens.

Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Think of it as strace + tcpdump + lsof + awesome sauce.

With a little Lua cherry on top.

Having gone through all the pain of polishing an OpenStack installation, I can see why it might seem like a better idea to grab a couple of beers in a local bar than spend additional hours fighting Nagios or Cacti. In the world of bare metal these tools seem to do the job—they warn about abnormal activities and provide insight into trend graphs.

With the advent of the cloud, however, proper monitoring has started getting out of hand for many IT teams. On top of the relatively predictable hardware, a complicated pile of software called “cloud middleware” has been dropped in our laps. Huge numbers of virtual resources (VMs, networks, storage) are coming and going at a rapid pace, causing unpredictable workload peaks.

Proper methods of dealing with this mess are in their infancy – and could even be worth launching a startup company around. This post is an attempt to shed some light on the various aspects of cloud monitoring, from the hardware to the user’s cloud ecosystem.

The USB Weather Data Receiver USB-WDE1 wirelessly receives data from various weather sensors of ELV at 868 MHz. The receiver is connected to a USB port on the computer, so no additional power supply is required. The data is transmitted via a simple serial ASCII protocol, which is well documented by ELV. The RasberryPi running Raspbian is used for the data acquisition allowing very little power consumption while being completely flexible.

logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs. It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.

GLPI is the Information Resource-Manager with an additional Administration- Interface. You can use it to build up a database with an inventory for your company (computer, software, printers...). It has enhanced functions to make the daily life for the administrators easier, like a job-tracking-system with mail-notification and methods to build a database with basic information about your network-topology.

Linux system administrators often receive complaints about the performance of their systems.

It can be rather difficult to track down these problems and to find why, when, and how often they happen. Being able to zoom in on the processes that are responsible, and to see what has happened in the past, is very valuable.

The atop utility was written with just these things in mind.