Welcome to the NCAR Tools Group
The NCAR Tools Group is a collaborative effort among the Systems Administrators at NCAR to develop robust and freely
available monitoring packages. Our monitors keep an eye on things from the standard SAR metrics of CPU and disk I/O
to the not so standard RAM usage, uptime and load average. Other metrics that our monitors keep track of are network
traffic volume, disk usage and user quotas, SAN traffic volume, power usage and temperature conditions.
Why Monitor?
For system health, overall performance and security. And above all, because you can't prove much without a graph.
Checking up on your systems periodically allows you to establish a baseline for comparison and can help pinpointing
problems later on. The tools we provide here measure a wide variety of system metrics and produce graphs that help
the data make more sense.
The systems administrators at NCAR have developed (or modified) a number of software packages that are useful in our environment for systems monitoring. They might help you, too.
The Software
All of the code below is in frequent, if not daily, use by systems administration staff at NCAR. In addition to the monitoring packages that we use, there are also a number of other scripts that help to make our lives easier. The documentation may be a little (OK, a lot) lacking, but it does work for us. Limited (i.e., a few e-mail exchanges) support is available.
| Monitoring Packages | |
|---|---|
| Software Package | Description |
| LogCheck | Logfile filtering and e-mail reporting. |
| MiscSAR | Miscellaneous System Activity Reporter - Everything SAR forgot. |
| MiscSARGE | MiscSAR Graph Engine |
| NARC | Network Activities Reporting Chimp |
| NAR | Network Activity Reporter |
| PDUMon | APC/PDU Monitoring |
| QuotaMon | User disk usage monitor |
| QuotaMonGER | Quota Monitor Graphing Engine and Reporter |
| SANdMan | Storage Area Network Monitor (Coming Soon) |
| SARGE | System Activity Reporter Graph Engine |
| SysDoc | System documentation/Backup Utility |
| TorqueAcctGr | Torque Accounting Graphs |
| TempMon | Temperature Monitoring/Logging Scripts |
| Other Handy Scripts | |
|---|---|
| Software Package | Description |
| df1 | New and improved version of df command that includes bind mounts and has cleaner output. |
| EasyPass | Generates a list of semi-memorable passwords for your choosing. |
| grub2 select kernel | An easier method to list grub2 kernels available for booting and setting a default. |
| Mail On Reboot | Sends a mail message when a system has been rebooted. |
| Make User SSH Keys | Generates and exchanges user SSH keys for a keyed, passwordless login from one system to another. |
| MOTDGen | Message of the Day Generator |
| vgdev | View device information for logical volume groups |