Virtual server monitor
From Revolution Linux OpenSource projects
The distributed Linux-VServer Web monitor
You are using Linux-VServer on a lot of machines. Each time you are looking for a vserver, you have to connect to each host and use the vserver-stat command? Or worse, you just have a big sheet of paper that nobody understands, especially the guy that is taking your job during your vacations?
Then, Virtual server monitor is the right tool for you!
Virtual server monitor is a monitoring tool for Linux-VServer, the most efficient and lightweight virtualization technology available for Linux. Virtual server monitor (or vsmon) is developped by Guillaume Pratte of Révolution Linux, a company specialized in large-scale deployment of Linux infrastructures. The tool gives system administrator a global view of all vservers running on his park.
vsmon aims to be a monitoring solution only. For now, it does not offer control over the vservers life cycle (for example, provisionning, start, stop and restart operation). To use vsmon you must deploy one backend on each vserver host and one frontend, preferably in it's own vserver.
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News
- July 5th, 2007
- vsmon 0.5.1 released. This release's main emphasis is stability. See the Change log.
- A presentation on vsmon by it's author Guillaume Pratte will be held on the 8th Rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre in France, on July 13th, 2007.
- December 22, 2006
- vsmon 0.5 is released on SourceForge. See the Change log.
Download and installation
- Source code is available on SourceForge.
- Installation instructions are available here.
- Source code is also available via anonymous subversion checkout :
svn co https://svn.revolutionlinux.com/OpenRevolution/vsmon/tags/version-0.5.1
or, for the development version :
svn co https://svn.revolutionlinux.com/OpenRevolution/vsmon/trunk
License
Most of the code is covered under the GPL v2, with some part of the code licensed with compatible licence. See this file for details.
Program architecture
vsmon has three components :
- The backend, running on a host optionnaly using the Linux-VServer technology;
- The frontend, a web application listing hosts' informations;
- The Nagios plugin, facilitating the monitoring of the host's memory, swap and disk usage.
The backend is installed on the hosts. The frontend is installed preferably in it's own vserver guest, and displays information from the backends. The Nagios plugin communicates with the backend to monitor the host.
Technologies used
vsmon is developped entirely using Python. The web frontend uses Django, one of the best (if not the best) Python-based web framework currently available. Communication between the backend and the frontend is assured by Pyro.
Security
Simple security mesures (for now) are used in vsmon. The backend has an allowed host whitelist, so that only the frontend will be able to connect to the backend. The frontend uses Django's standard authentication mecanisms to ensure access control.
Problems
See this page.
Mailing list
TODO
See Virtual server monitor:TODO.
Other similar projects
- The closest project to vsmon is OpenVCP (Open-Source VServer Control Panel). In contrast with vsmon, OpenVCP aims to be a control panel for web hosting companies offering virtual private servers to their clients. OpenVCP's backend is written in C, and it's web frontend in PHP.
- PlanetLab is a distributed computing research project using the Linux-VServer technology. All tools are written in Python, and a backend communicating with XML-RPC is installed on each host, enabling the remote control of the vservers.
- VServer Control Daemon is a project aiming to implement a backend written in C and communicating with XML-RPC to control a Linux-VServer host and it's guests.
