Yamon 0.92

Here ye, here ye, there's a new Yamon available!

This release adds the following wonderfulness:

• White-box monitoring: check_syshealth
• yamon.cgi: a CGI-script which exposes most of the commonly monitored system metrics in the format expected by check_syshealth

That's all for now. But it's really cool, if you ask me!

The yamon.cgi program tries to autodetect all the things that matter; which filesystems exist, which log-files are actively rotated under /var/log. It works on Mac OS X and the Linux variants I've tested (CentOS 5 and RH7.3).

Probably the most unique feature here is my attempt to detect unexpected log-file growth and allow yamon.pl to alert on that. But I don't know if it's really unique, I'm just proud of it. :-P

Yamon 0.91

I've uploaded a new Yamon release. Improvements:

• Different tests can have different alert targets
  
• Alerts can be sent to syslog or other arbitrary programs
  
• Direct SMTP can be used instead of invoking 'mail' to send e-mail alerts
  

So the alerting stuff is more or less feature complete now. Yay!

If you're one of the two or three people that actually downloaded the program, and if you happen to be using it, take care that the syntax for specifying multiple alert recipients has changed. Instead of using ',' as a delimiter, I've switched to ';'.

As far as I know I'm still the only user, so I don't expect this to matter much. I'll try to refrain from changing syntax in non-backwards compatibles ways in the future.

Yamon 0.9

I've uploaded my first public Yamon release, dubbed version 0.9.

Main features:

1. It works!
2. There is a HOWTO; installation should be a breeze.
   
3. Built-in tests for HTTP, SMTP, SSH and of course 'ping'.
4. A generic TCP test which can do expect-style testing of pretty much anything.
5. Inter-test dependencies so when your network breaks, it won't report everything else as being broken too.
6. Alerts sent via. e-mail only, at the moment.

I'm using it, it does most of what I want and is useful, so I'm releasing it to The Internets.

Things it doesn't do yet, but are planned for "version 1.0":

1. Allow different tests to alert different people.
2. Test system-health (using a helper CGI?) and fire alerts when machines run low on disk space, memory or other internal resources.
   
3. Fire alerts using external programs (other than mail).
4. Log to syslog.
5. Possibly send e-mail via. direct SMTP instead of invoking mail?
6. Make it export current status to an HTML file.
7. Write stuff on this page about how to implement useful monitoring with this tool. For now, see the comments in the sample.yam file.

Any questions, comments, suggestions? Post a comment!

Web site up and running

So this is a rough first draft of a Yamon web-site. I'm going to try using Blogger for this for now, as it's fast, free and highly available. It may not be what all the cool kids do, but I'm lazy and I think this should do the job just fine.

If you have any questions, just post a comment.