On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, David Nolan wrote: > My best summary of Mon is that its monitoring for sysadmins.
i totally concur with david. what he said is spot-on. i will add a few things, though: the design of mon is extremely flexible, and was purposefully built the way it was in order to leverage other tools which already exist. it follows the traditional Unix design philosophy, which i think is the most elegant system design in existence to this very day. it is all about having a mechanism to connect together lots of smaller tools which do one job very well in order to solve larger problems, rather than writing a large tool for each new problem. you can also think of this design in terms of using natural language, words and grammar to phrase something you want to say. perl itself also follows this model. larry wall is a linguist (a cunning one at that, sorry couldn't resist the pun), and he applied that to perl. for example, mon leverages fping, the net-snmp tools, traceroute, rrdtool, etc. another example of mon's flexibility is how an on-call notification system with escalation was added without changing anything in mon at all, it was just a matter of writing a custom alert and plugging it in to your mon configuration file with the correct grammar. in order to get a good idea of how mon works, i would recommend reading the slides from this presentation: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/admin/mon/mon-talk-0.4.tar.gz _______________________________________________ mon mailing list mon@linux.kernel.org http://linux.kernel.org/mailman/listinfo/mon
