Linux system monitoring overview

Outline

I. monitoring overview

Ii. Monitoring Classification

Iii. monitoring tools

Iv. Summary

Note: not all content in this blog post is original from the open source community and the official website.

I. monitoring overview

How to scientifically, systematically and efficiently monitor the overall and detailed operation of the existing IT architecture is a very important task for O & M and management departments of enterprises. With the increasing number and type of servers and applications in the enterprise IT environment, the O & M department needs to use scientific and efficient means to obtain as detailed, real-time, and accurate details as possible about how the entire architecture works on every server, every system, or even every application, in addition, raw data is analyzed, drawn, and analyzed to provide a reference for subsequent performance tuning, construction adjustment, and troubleshooting.

Common monitoring objects basically cover all aspects of the IT operating environment, including the data center environment, hardware, and network, while various monitoring projects are involved in each aspect. For example, the monitoring of the hardware environment includes the server's operating temperature, fan speed and other indicators. The monitoring of the system environment includes the basic operating system operating environment, such as CPU, memory, I/O, storage space usage, network throughput, process count, and status. For specific applications, more information may be monitored, there will also be many application-specific indicators.

In addition to monitoring content that should be as comprehensive as possible, we also hope that the monitoring solution we use can be flexible and have more extended functions. For example, IT can effectively support changes and extensions of the IT architecture, occupy as few resources as possible when the monitoring volume increases, and have a powerful event notification mechanism.

This blog post mainly monitors operating systems and software environments, and especially Linux operating systems. Although there are a lot of commercial software and solutions to implement the relevant functions, but in fact we also have a lot of open-source solutions can play the same role, and the effect is also very good. In the following content, we will describe the implementation methods of these solutions in detail.

Ii. Monitoring Classification

There are basically two methods for system monitoring on Linux,

First, it is implemented through SNMP protocol combined with data collection software:

The architecture involved in this method generally consists of two parts, one of which is the monitored server and the other is the monitoring server. Specifically, the implementation method is to start the process of the Simple Network Management Protocol of SNMP on the Linux server to dynamically provide the running parameters of the server in software or even hardware, in this way, the server becomes a monitored node. The client software on other monitoring servers should have two functions: collecting SNMP data and collecting statistics. In most cases, the monitoring software on the monitoring server provides the system running status chart based on the Web page and covers various running indicators. At the same time, the new status information can be dynamically updated to the Web page. The data format obtained by this type of monitoring is comprehensive and easy to configure. Therefore, it is a good solution from the perspective of comprehensive monitoring.

Second, you can write a script to call the system status monitoring command and use the data collection software to achieve the following:

In some cases, the configuration of the SNMP protocol is relatively troublesome, and different monitoring software needs to be selected to obtain the SNMP information. From another perspective, the Linux operating system itself provides many very useful state acquisition tools, such as sar (which can monitor multiple indicators ), iostat (For I/O usage monitoring), vmstat (for cpu and memory usage monitoring), and free commands. These tools can be periodically called by combining system task plans and self-compiled scripts, which provides great convenience for monitoring. Because these commands can be embedded into the script to periodically generate the data required by the system monitoring software, the data can be combined with the drawing software to generate an intuitive Statistical Chart. The information obtained by this type of monitoring is more flexible and accurate. It is more handy for some users who are familiar with Script Programming. In addition, in this case, command monitoring can be expanded without limit, and users can obtain and customize their own monitoring scripts through various pipelines.

For more details, please continue to read the highlights on the next page:

Recommended reading:

Cacti construction document under CentOS 6

Detailed description of Cacti monitoring deployment under RHEL5.9

How to install Cacti in CentOS 6.3

Quick installation and configuration of Cacti in CentOS Linux

Nagios details: click here
Nagios: click here

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