GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

GnilronEye 1.1, a java-based system monitoring solution, is now available for download. GnilronEye 1.1 introduces an advanced http-monitoring feature and a new report feature that include sgraphs of the monitored items. A number of minor issues regarding the AJAX powered dashboard have also been fixed with this release.

GnilronEye is a free (released "as is" and redistribution is forbidden without explicit permission, as stated by the license) system monitoring platform that can keep an eye on your distributed system. GnilronEye monitors following on Win32, Linux, Solaris and HP-UX: Events are notified using mail or using news feed (RSS 2.0 or ATOM). GnilronEye also provides an AJAX powered dashboard that displays live values collected from the hosts being monitored. Check out the features page on the GnilronEye website or test the live demo installation to see the AJAX dashboard in action. The live demo is available from the homepage.

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

For a complementary Java EE monitoring solution, check out MessAdmin, which plugs directly into your web applications.

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

Hi,

how do these features work in pure java:


I could only think of calling `top' or something similar in Linux and parsing the output ...

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

Hi,
Yep, the java-agent executes os-specific commands like top, vmstat with some variations on different platforms. The idea behind this is to avoid having to install native libraries in an often restricted environment. When monitoring processes and host CPU on Win32 two additional tools are required as stated in the reference guide (5.7):

http://gnilron.se/eye/docs/html/installation.html#win32extras

These extra requirements for Win32 might be migrated to Powershell, unfortunately powershell consumes too much memory.

It would have been nice to have this OS-instrumentation in "core-java" as part of jmx.

// Torben - Gnilron AB

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

This is probably the shortest license description I have ever seen :)

What does term "AS IS" used in license agreement mean? Does it mean that commercial companies are free to use it? Is there a cost to it? Is there a cost to redistribution (assuming that GnilronEye agreed to it)?

The product seems like a nice, but fairly basic, server monitoring tool and definitely should be useful whenever light weight server monitoring solution is required.

Is it extensible? For example, does it have an API for other products to plug in their monitoring features?

Best,
Dmitriy
GridGain - Grid Computing Made Easy

Hyperic addresses this issue with SIGAR

SIGAR (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) is a cross-platform, Open Source (GNU GPL) library that runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX and AIX. SIGAR allows us to pull a wide variety of system-level metrics from all of our supported platforms. It's a treat - http://sourceforge.net/projects/sigar

-John Mark
Community Manager
Hyperic, Inc.
http://www.hyperic.com/

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

Hi Dmitriy,
The license need some clarification. I agree, its short, and pretty cryptic :-). I will try to make it more concrete but what I'm trying to explain is that it's free to use for any usage, commercial or none commercial.

Regarding extensibility: The only way to plugin your own information today is through logfiles. The logfile monitor use regular expressions to identify certain information that you want to find. There is a "tool" inside which let you experiment with this. Another way could be to expose information on a webpage and let the http-content monitor fetch and verify this information (Not really the best way, but would work fine).

I'm looking into better ways to solve this for the next major version. Standard JMX could be one way to go as JMX is used internaly inside the agent, some AOP'ish approach would be nice, Spring AOP integration, Groovy scripting would be another way.

Any suggestions?

Re: GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released

What would be nice is if a product, let's say like GridGain, would be able to create it's own dashboard with it's own custom gauges. Then you would potentially have many other products hooking into your monitoring framework.

As far as implementation, I think the best way would be to provide a clear Java API and perhaps some way to wire it up using Spring IoC.

Best,
Dmitriy
GridGain - Grid Computing Made Easy

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