What is Yamon?

Yamon is a very simple Perl program designed to check whether a server is up-and-running and send an alert to a human when something appears to be broken.

Things you might want to monitor:

  • Is your web-server up and running?
  • Is it actually serving up the right pages?
  • Is your mail-server accepting e-mail?
  • Has your grandma's DSL line disconnected?

Yamon can check such things for you and let you know when stuff breaks.

It can also perform some basic troubleshooting (tests can depend on other tests), to venture a guess as to why things aren't working properly.

Yamon is designed with simplicity as it's number two goal. Number one is to get the job done.

What is Yamon not?

Yamon is not an "enterprise grade system monitoring solution". It probably isn't suitable for a large corporate network or a professional ISP, for example. If that's what you need, take a look at Nagios.

Yamon doesn't create graphs. It doesn't track trends or do capacity planning. It doesn't make toast.

But if you just have one or two systems and you just want to know when they break, Yamon might be what you're looking for.

Great, what do I need?

There should be a download link in the sidebar and some very basic documentation in the archive.

Yamon wants to run as a cron job on a Unix machine (any Linux, BSD or Mac box will probably do). The machine has to be able to send e-mail using the "mail" command-line utility. You'll need a working perl installation (all modern Unixes have this) and a connection to the Internet; somewhere to send alerts and something worth monitoring.

If you have a mobile phone and your telco provides an e-mail to SMS gateway, then you're all set to receive real-time alerts anytime, anywhere!



News...

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!

Posted by Bjarni Rúnar on Sunday, September 23, 2007

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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.

Posted by Bjarni Rúnar on Saturday, September 22, 2007

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