monitoring a linux box

mmosier · 07-15-2010, 09:54 PM

Hey all

I wanted to know the best way to monitor memory usage, us space and processes and receive an email if a problem occurs?

Thanks in advance

Michael

Tinkster · 07-15-2010, 10:14 PM

Hi, welcome to LQ!

There's no "best way", there's a lot of choices. The selection of which
will depend on your use-case. One machine, many? Monitoring intervals?
Flexibility? Extensibility? Types of alerts? Will mail suffice if the
process sending the mail dies because of memory exhaustion?

If you want a targeted response, provide more detailed input, please.

Cheers,
Tink

keeperofdakeys · 07-15-2010, 10:16 PM

The command free will give you memory info, the command df will give you used space info and ps or top will give you info about processes.
You could make a shell script to parse the output of these commands, to search for situations which you don't like (like running out of memory), and get it to email you if something goes wrong. You then make the shell script a cron event, so that it runs every hour or something.