Any system administrator worth their salt has some kind of system for collecting and maintaining information about all the systems they're responsible for. Gathering that info by hand, especially when the systems are inherited, can be time-consuming. Or you could try out boxinfo, a Perl script that gathers most or all of the information you'd want in a few easy steps. Boxinfo is simple to run, just run it on any Linux system that has Perl and it will look for information about the disk space, processor, memory, network interfaces, mounted disks, versions of utilities, and general system environment. Once finished, it prints out an HTML page or page in Wikimedia format, and a debug file that shows all commands run and the output. This can be useful to identify Perl modules you might be missing to gather information.
Logdog is a tool that monitors messages passing through syslogd and takes action based on key words and phrases. Logdog has a configuration file which allows you to specify a list of key words or phrases to alert on, and a list of commands that can be run when those words are encountered. Logdog is licensed under the GPL.
Alert Manager was created to run a (alert) command, monitor the status of that command's output, and guarantee that if something goes wrong it won't go unnoticed. Alert Manager has been successfully deployed in several fortune 500 companies providing guaranteed alert delivery and command execution. It has a very flexable configuration file that allows creation of "alert chains" - chains of commands, each with their own fallback command, failure command, timeout, retry counter, and other advanced options. It has a method for passing messages from the command line into the various commands defined in the configuration file and many other useful features. Alert Manager is licensed under the GPL.
The xen-vm-autosnapshot.py script has been updated with an important new option: –snapshot-tag. I still can’t believe I made such a silly oversight, but previous versions of this script had no way of differentiating between snapshots created automatically and those that were created manually. So if you happened to have some old manual snapshots lying around, the snapshot-rotate routine would have rotated them along with all the rest.
Computer monitoring systems are used to gather data for the purpose of real-time incident notification, performance analysis, and system health verification. Without such a tool, a system administrator would have to login to each machine to collect information on a regular basis. This kind of repetitive task can be automated using a system monitoring tool. System monitoring can also help identify problems before they escalate to emergency status. This type of software is not only useful for network administrators. Home users with a small network or even just a single computer will benefit from advanced notification provided by system monitoring tools. Knowing that free space on the hard disk is running out, or that a particular server/daemon has gone down can be extremely useful.
P2V stands for Physical to Virtual. In other words, it is the process or procedure of moving a running system (operating system and everything installed) from a physical machine to a virtual machine.