What is the best tool to monitor services on linux?
 

What is the best tool to monitor services on linux?

By service I mean like exim, to monitor that port 25 is open, and /usr/sbin/exim is running, and accepting connections.

What would be best for that? Nagios?

I don't know if Nagios is the "best", but I have been using it for years and I can make it do what ever I want so Nagios is what I recommend.

I'd second Nagios in this situation. its a great product.

While I agree that nagios does a good job I'd like to
hear from you how many machines and/or services you
intend to monitor. If the number is small it may make
sense to do something manually via shell or perl-script,
rather than going to install nagios and configure it.

Its power comes at a cost - configuration ;}



Cheers,
Tink

This would be for 1 machine.

And how many services?


If it's 1 machine and only smtp, I'd say it's complete
overkill to install nagios.


expect & telnet in a shell script would be sufficient,
or netcat ...


Cheers,
Tink

I very much agree with this. A shell script on a remote machine would work just as well.