Autostatus is a network and server monitoring program. It is designed
to support large, arbitrarily complex networks of computers, and still
provide feedback in a very timely fashion. To that extent, it has
the following goals:
- Speed - Autostatus attempts to probe for network status
as quickly as possible.
- Efficiency - Autostatus will not attempt to check for
status on portions of the network it already
knows are down, eliminating redundant checks.
- Accuracy - Autostatus presents as accurate a picture of
the network status as it can from its perspective.
Autostatus has some features which make it fairly unique among network
monitoring programs:
- Dependency Resolution
- Autostatus can be given information about the path it takes to
reach network segments, or other dependencies in network or server
topology. Given this dependency information, autostatus will then
query for status in the proper order in order to guarantee that:
- Nothing is queried before all of the items upon which it depends
have already been queried.
- Nothing is queried if an item upon which it depends is down.
- Items are not incorrectly marked as down when they are simply
unreachable due to a dependency failure.
This dependency resolution is, of course, fully recursive. The
software will also warn about abnormal conditions in the configuration
file such as cyclical dependencies.
- Parallel status gathering
- Autostatus uses the excellent
fping program written by
Roland J. Schemers III at Stanford University. (see the
fping copyright below).
By intelligently grouping services together for parallel
testing, Autostatus minimizes the amount of time necessary
to scan large numbers of networks or servers.
For testing TCP services, Autostatus uses a component called
tcpcheck to perform parallel checks of TCP connections.
tcpcheck was developed specifically for Autostatus, but has
considerable utility outside of Autostatus.
- Status Web Page
- Autostatus automatically generates a status web page which
reflects the current-known network and server status on a per-item
basis.
- Email notification
- Autostatus sends email when the state of a monitored item changes
(based upon configurable thresholds). Using an email to pager
program (such as hellpage, by the author, or various other paging
programs), it is very easy to route notifications for each service
to the correct party.
- Multiple service monitoring
- Autostatus can monitor both routers/hosts via ICMP messages, and
specific services on machines via TCP connections. In keeping with
the themes of autostatus, TCP connections may be avoided if the
machine is not reachable via ICMP, or may be tried at all times.
Sample Output
Availability
At the present time, Autostatus is available only via a a consulting
arrangement with the author. The price for a typical installation
(including setup, testing, and one month monitoring) is $400, but
varies with the complexity and organization of the network, and the
features required.
Legal stuff
This software makes use of fping.c, which was created at Stanford
University. The fping copyright is included with all installations of
Autostatus.