Pulp Free: Status

A few updates to list… Cacti has been updated to version 0.8.7b. I’m afraid that with the new job – my obsession with Cacti has left me a little behind in my updates. I still haven’t even been able to get my 2nd grade shell scripts posted here… Agh! Well, a little good news…. Even thought I’m heads down working on Business Availability Center, I came back around and updated my own scripts since I’ve installed a lot of VM servers. I now have a quick MPSTAT script that shows individual CPU counters… Thought it would be cool to have now that a new demo HP DL160 is heating up my basement… (Check these nice stats out…)

So far it’s hosting 13 virtual servers and the performance is great (as long as you don’t push the I/O – those poor SATA drives aren’t so hot…) With mostly Win2K3R2 being run for BAC, Diagnostics, RUM, MSSQL, Oracle, WebSphere, BPM, and SiteScope – it’s great with plenty of headroom for more testing…

My only question is whether or not to keep Linux running as the host… It took me about 5 different distributions to get the goofy HP SATA RAID controller to be recognized… However, multiple flavors of Windows hiccuped as well for other issues…

I’ve made a quick update for the Cacti software to version 0.87a today. A few new features that I’m excited to start playing around with are the plugins now available and the ability to have transparency in graphs…

More of my co-workers have been perusing by 6,000+ graphs which got me wondering what all was new a great in the world of Cacti… Obviously a lot of fun things to play with! And yes – eventually I’ll get those Linksys scripts of mine posted for you to use…

Interesting that I just came across this note:

Since WordPress.com broke 10 million pageviews today, I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about keeping track of all the servers that run WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, Ping-o-matic, etc. Currently we have over 300 servers online in 5 different data centers across the country. Some of these are collocated, and others are with dedicated hosting providers, but the bottom line is that we need to keep track of them all as if they were our children! Currently we use Nagios for server health monitoring, Munin for graphing various server metrics, and a wiki to keep track of all the server hardware specs, IPs, vendor IDs, etc. All of these tools have suited us well up until now, but there have been some scaling issues.

You know I just had to leave a note about my Cacti obsession. I just wish I could show off my 6,000+ graphs from my work life! LOL – for now – I only have these few graphs here… So sad! (Yes – I know I can export them – but it took the server about 36 hours to write out all of the HTML and graphs the last time I did it…)

I came across a few more ideas mostly by accident on how to track bandwidth from my router. One of the issues I’ve had with my home network is that while I can monitor devices (such as my PowerConnet 2716 & Linksys router) – I don’t get visibility into my virtual devices or devices being secondary routers (like in my Media Lounge). They all come lumped together. Wel – now I’m a little bit closer to seeing what’s going on by using IPTables on my Tomato-based Linksys. With a few more scripts added and some more templates – I’m now able to see Internet usage for any of the devices on my network.

This is probably the best I’m going to get for a while – as I’m not going to be able to monitor those devices on my LAN unless they all tie back to a port on my router.

I suppose I do need to start getting some of these scripts available at some time…

Enjoy!

_dave

After a false start, I was able to get status.pulpfree.org back on my home servers for now. I mostly spent the additional time since I wanted to get my PowerConnect and Tomato graphs back up and running. (Yes – I know, what’s the big deal with my graphing fascination!)

For Sam who posted a comment back in April – I updated my scripts for pulling stats from Tomato for use in Cacti as well as creating some templates to use the RRD files created in PowerConnect. I’ll be posting some of those hacks in a few days… I just need to clean up my graphs to all show bits/sec instead of my goofy “make per 5 minutes” that are messing up the actual presentation.
Enjoy!