PULSAR - AN EXTENSIBLE TOOL FOR MONITORING LARGE UNIX SITES

Many problems can crop up unexpectedly on Unix computers, and the admi nistrator must be able to detect and react to these problems quickly. If a site has more than a few computers, the effort needed to keep abr east of problems can lead to unresponsive administration. Pulse monito rs form a simple but effective tool to assist the administrator in thi s task. This paper describes the Pulsar pulse-monitor package. It is c omposed of a presenter, which provides a graphical user interface to t he administrator, a set of individual pulse monitors, which examine as pects of the status on a host and communicate their results to the pre senter, and a scheduler, which executes pulse monitors according to th e frequency specified by its configuration files. The set of pulse mon itors is easily extended by the administrator to provide warnings abou t any situation that can be algorithmically detected. (C) 1997 by John Whey & Sons, Ltd.