Much has been written about how to set up different monitoring tools to look after the health of your Linux servers. This article attempts to present a concise overview of the most important metrics available on Linux and the associated tools. CPU utilization CPU usage is usually the first place we look when a server [...]

In a previous post we discussed how to improve the performance of BerkeleyDB by tuning the cache size. Let’s see how Paid Monitor can help you keep tabs on the cache hit rate and other critical database metrics. We use a custom monitor created by a perl script, monitor_bdb.pl, which can be downloaded from our repository on [...]

Got Cacti? Proper disclosure – the author have never properly used Cacti as a monitoring system in a production environment. So what’s Cacti? – I’m not sure that after the proper disclosure I can actually comment too much, but from my first impression, Cacti is a fairly comprehensive server and network monitoring platform for Unix. It’ll support graphing [...]

This blog is on the 12th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Thank you, sysadmins for all your hard work, long hours and sleepless nights spent on deploying and maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure. Many of us at Paid Monitor started as sysadmins. It is a tough task. It’s like being a Swiss Army knife – [...]

Paid Monitor provides the ability to monitor almost any operation on your server.  Using simple Linux tools and scripts you are able to monitor each time a user logs into the server and capture various information, including username, host address and login service.  Using pam_script and bash scripts, you are able to transmit information to a [...]