Lightweight, secure server monitoring

2003- by Volker Tanger [email protected]

homepage with screenshots: http://www.wyae.de/software/mosshe/

MoSShE (MOnitoring in Simple SHell Environment) is a simple, lightweight (both in size and system requirements) server monitoring package designed for secure and in-depth monitoring of single or multiple typical/critical internet systems.

As most of the servers/services I want to monitor are remote systems, traditional NMS (relying on close-looped and/or unencrypted sessions) are either big, complicated to install for safe remote monitoring, ressource intense (when doing remote checks), lack a status history or a combination thereof.

Thus I wrote this small, easily configured system. It originally was intended for monitoring of single a handful of typical internet systems. With the more recent system and grouping features monitoring of serious numbers of systems is easily possible.

MoSShE supports email alerts and SLA monitoring out of the box - and whatever you can script.

The system is programmed in plain (Bourne) SH, and to be compatible with BASH and Busybox so it can easily be deployed on embedded systems.

Monitoring is designed to be distributed over multiple systems, usually running locally. As no parameters are accepted from outside, checks cannot be tampered or misused from outside.

The system is designed to allow decentralized checks and evaluation as well as classical agent-based checks with centralized data accumulation.

Agent data is transferred via HTTP (pull-mode) or FTP, SSH, SCP, ... in push-mode, so available web servers can be co-used for agent data transfer. Additionally each agent creates simple (static) HTML pages with full and condensed status reports on each system, allowing simple local checks.