Ideas for landscape-sysinfo tool

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer <gustavo at niemeyer.net> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm one of the developers working on the Landscape project at
> Canonical[1].  Recently we've started working on a tool, so far named
> landscape-sysinfo, which will be used to display some dynamic
> information next to the MOTD message during logins.

is that information going to be dynamically generated each time an
user does login, or it's going to be updated in a file every X
minutes, and the motd message will just happen to be the latest
version available?    Personally I have some servers I never login
into, unless I know there is a problem with it, or I know security
updates are available, which make that message a bit pointless to
display at login time only.

If that "motd" info was available in a file, then I could find a way
to push that into a centralized server where I could see it no matter
when I do an actual login.

And actually that type of expanded motd message may be more useful on
my desktop computer where I login more often than on a server that
just happily runs in a corner of the server room serving services or
disk space without human intervention for days at end.

> The goal of this tool is to provide the administrator a basic overview
> of how the system is running.  To give a basic feeling of what it is
> about, a rough mockup follows.  Please note that we don't even know
> yet which of these details will be available, and how they will be
> actually worded.
>
>    System load:  1.15     Processes:       1500
>    Memory usage: 65%      Temperature:     74 C
>    Swap usage:   None     Users logged on: 1 (you)
>
>    => Zombie processes were found alive.
>    => Disk usage on /home is above 90%.
>    => This machine is being affected by USNs 123, 456 and 789.
>
> The headers at the top will always be present, while notes at the
> bottom will report outstanding events.
>
> So the question is: what information would you find useful to look at
> during logins, to get an idea of how things are going in your servers?

These days I'm playing with the getting old Big Brother (www.bb4.org)
to centralize messages from various servers into one web page.  Now
looking at some of the info I have been tracking that way from my
servers:  connectivity, system load, disk usage (i.e, specific
important disks are nearly full while other disks I can ignore), if
specific processes are still running (by default big brother tracks
cron), and if specific services are online and listening (ftp, http,
ssh). I could see some of these bits of info being useful in that motd
message.

It is on my to-do list to tied into Dell's OMSA and track down as well
more hardware specific basic info (temperature, state of disks and
raid, are the fans working, etc).


Daniel

-- 
Daniel Robitaille
 http://friendfeed.com/robitaille