Introduction

Linspector can do simple ping tests to more complex server responses and all kind of values you could request over a network. This could be the system load, the temperature of the CPU or some sensor data from all kind of devices. This could all be done using plugins for disc usage etc. but also self written scripts and programs which are requesting data of any kind.

Linspector will support SNMP! Requesting information from Nagios is possible too but we do not recommend that. The design of Linspector is different then from Nagios. We don't want "special" plugins or programs (agents) running on the monitored hosts like Nagios is doing it. Requesting Nagios plugins on remote hosts will break our design of simplicity and reliability.

Linspector will not need any agent software running on the remote host or device! Linspector is using standard software like SSH, SNMP, Telnet etc. Maybe we will write an agent at some time but for now we will try to implement everything without the use of software that needs to be installed on the monitored host.

Linspector aims not to compete with projects like Nagios, Munin etc. These are greta tools that are doing all the jobs like creating graphs etc. Linspector is different. Linspector is limited to a small subset of features to maximize its simplicity and performance. Linspector is for example just collecting data and then doing all needed things for reporting alerts but afterwards just writes the data into a database like MongoDB for later usage. Other tools can then access this data for visualisation and SLA reporting. Linspector does not care about what the data is used for afterwards. MongoDB is used as default storage engine but you could store the data elsewhere. Anyway you don't need to make use of a storage engine. Just discard the data after alerting is done.

What does Linspector do for you?

  • Collecting data
  • Parsing/Analyzing the data
  • Alerting
  • Saving the data somewhere (optionally)

What does Linspector - currently - not do for you?

  • Visualisation
  • Report creation
  • Detailed error reports
  • Deliver backtrace information
  • SLA reports
  • Statistics

Be sure that everything that Linspector is not able to do by default, everything is possible by writing an extension. So you could really create graphs etc. directly from Linspector but we really recommend not to do that. Keep in mind that the host, that is monitoring your infrastructure, is a very important machine. Let this machine do all the needed things and put the overhead over to some worker machines.

Details

Linspector will be able to monitor for example this:

  • Uptime checks using HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS etc.
  • SNMP, SSH, TCP/UDP and maybe the Nagios Agent (NRPE)
  • Database checks for MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL etc.
  • Mailserver checks using SMTP, POP3, IMAP etc.
  • Content checks of websites
  • Alerting via eMail, XMPP, SMS and more

The list of services is endless so if you know other monitoring solutions it will be just writing some few lines of Python code to probe _whatever_ service.

Integrity

Linspector can be extended to support a lot more stuff then listed above. In short: Linspector can monitor everything!

We are trying to make it easy to integrate Linspector in existing, strict and ITIL conform infrastructures.