System Utilities You Can't Live Without

By Alex Handy

August 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 6)
A poor craftsman blames his tools. But then, a craftsman is only as good as his tools. And as Mr. Natural always said: Use the right tool for the job!

Managers have their hands full monitoring, analyzing and testing their systems. And managers have come to rely heavily on tools to help perform those tasks, whether they are purchased, taken from open-source communities or customized for their own purposes.

And there are certain tools that systems managers have come to realize they can’t work without. Here are what those administrators listed as their most valuable utilities.

Jesse Nelson, Unix systems architect at Military.com, first thought of mon, the open-source service monitoring daemon. While Nelson has used many monitoring tools over the years, it’s mon that tends to be his first resort. Military.com is a social network and job site specializing in current and former members of the military. The site runs on around 200 servers, 150 of which are based on Puppet, the open-source configuration management framework. Military.com runs on Java, LAMP and is currently rolling out Ruby applications internally.

“It’s still good code,” said Nelson of mon, “versus Nagios, which is a big, fat framework. We use mon and Nagios. We use mon to do lightweight stuff.” Nelson also festoons mon with another, older tool, Cricket, the open-source graphing tool.

“I’ve used Cacti, but it was more than I needed at the time. I just needed any kind of histogram. I’m checking out Graphite. There’s better stuff out there, but Cricket is pretty simple. I’m also an old fart, so these are the things I used eight years ago that still work well,” said Nelson.

Nelson’s list also included Apache’s mod_rewrite and SSH.

Spiceworks, however, is a newer utility that monitors and tracks networks' assets and statuses. It’s the favorite of Robert Baxter, CEO of Baxter IT, a consulting firm.

Baxter’s been running systems for 12 years, and he said that the best thing about Spiceworks is the price. “Most inventory systems are garbage,” said Baxter, but Spiceworks can find and catalog systems when given an IP range or the SNMP info.

Related Search Term(s): networking, systems management, Unix, Windows

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