[Oneiric-Topic] Monitoring plugin for byobu

[Raphaël Pinson]

Hi there,


There is one byobu plugin I've been using in production for a few
years now that I think could be very useful to more people: monitoring
support.

Like it or not, your servers are more likely to break when you're
hacking on them. You could keep an eye on monitoring (or let it page
you) every time you touch a server, but I don't know a lot of people
who do that, and so often you find out you've broken the service after
you've logged out.

For this reason, on quite a few of my production machines, I've added
a monitoring plugin to byobu, which retrieves the general status of
the machine in the monitoring system (BB4/Hobbit in our case) as well
as the status of each probe. The general status is displayed in the
hardstatus with a background color corresponding to the general status
of the machine in monitoring. Whenever something goes wrong, the
general color changes in the hardstatus, and the problematic probes
show up with their names and proper colors in the caption.

This has saved me tons of times on many occasions, since I see the
breakage in my shell session, even as I'm logged on the machine.

Ubuntu doesn't provide Hobbit by default, so my plugin is not usable
as it is, but maybe it could be nice to do a munin plugin for example,
which would call munin on localhost (munin is very easy to probe that
way) and provide a little monitoring interface in byobu.


Your thoughts?


Raphaël