ANN Mom.v3 - yet another monitoring system

[William Annis]

        In response to censorious comments and coy references to "the
bazaar" from my peers at LISA '99, I have decided to make the current
version of my Unix system monitoring system available in spite of its
wildly pre-alpha state.  I gave a Work in Progress (WiP) talk about
this, and several people who saw that talk have been looking at the
system, but I think it's time for a wider audience.

        The core of the system is written entirely in Python, which is
why I'm announcing it here first, instead of on Freshmeat.  I admit to
a strong Solaris bias, so there are several SWIGgy extensions to get
interesting data straight out of the kernel instead of forking off the
many tools and parsing their output.  The system is known to work on
RH Linux 6.0 as well, though the agents are less interesting.  Feel
free to send me Linux agents. :)

        The system has been designed as an infrastructure to allow the
statistical modeling (time series models, in particular) of a network
of computers from which will allow the system to identify unusual
behavior.  The statistical bits aren't finished yet -- I'm working
with several statisticians on the problem -- but the data collection
and notification system is very flexible.

        You can see the WiP slides (PostScript) for a quick overview
of why I did this: http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/mom3/wip.ps .

        The main web page for the system has more detail and links to
snapshots, docs and examples: http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/mom3/ .

        If you use Solaris, you'll also want my PyKstat package
installed to make best use of the many Solaris agents:
http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/creations/pykstat.html .

        Questions, comments (friendly) and bug reports always
welcome. 

-- 
William Annis - System Administrator - Biomedical Computing Group
annis at biostat.wisc.edu                       PGP ID:1024/FBF64031
Mi parolas Esperanton - La Internacia Lingvo    www.esperanto.org