Several weeks ago, we started using Ganglia to monitor all our servers. And I’m glad I did. For years we used a home-made system built on sysstat and RRDTool and it served its purpose, but then I discovered Ganglia. Our old system gave us performance statistics on a 10-minute delay but Ganglia is almost live, which is very helpful to see what’s happening now. It’s also much easier to setup, just apt-get ganglia-monitor, edit the /etc/gmond.conf file (if necessary) and a new server is being monitored. It’s that easy (if you use Debian).
Ganglia was originally funded by the place I interned for while in college (and, not coincidentally, my dad’s employer for 25 years), the National Science Foundation. That’s good government at work! 
4 Comments
Does that mean that when you were a kid, you had inside information on Zoom? One of my favorite tv shows and not just because of the still cool theme song?
What’s Zoom???
What’s Zoom? Why it is one of the longest running kids shows on PBS thats sponsore d by the National Science Foundation. The whole goal of the show is to get kids to stay interested in science and it has one of the catchiest theme songs ever. I guess it’s pretty obvious that your dad’s connections didn’t get you in to hang out with the cast or send in your favorite science experiment. But that’s ok. His genes and love of science must have somehow influenced your career in technology. So it’s all worked out ok.
Ah… NSF just forks out money to fund science stuff, they aren’t involved in anything other than writing the check. My dad was in the earthquakes division, and he probably thought TV was a fad so wasn’t interested in Zoom.