HotSaNIC 0.5.0 review

HotSaNIC (the acronym stands for "html overview to system and network information center") consists of a set of perl-scripts built on

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Bernd Pissny

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HotSaNIC (the acronym stands for "html overview to system and network information center") consists of a set of perl-scripts built on Tobias Oetiker's "rrdtool" to generate graphical system-statistics, currently supported platforms are linux (main development) and *BSD.

I started to build this tool in december 2000, because none of the existing stats-tools gave me the flexibility and resolution i expected. Most tools had a minimum query-time of one minute, while i use a 10sec. timebase, which shows a lot more dynamics in the graphs.

The whole project is built in a modular way to make it quite easy to expand, unused modules may be switched off easily.

Another advantage over most existing tools is the min/max-area that is drawn behind the average-graphs in many modules - a feature that reflects e.g. min/max bandwidth usage in much more detail than similar tools do.

The smallest time span that will be displayed covers the last hour, the longest span diagram covers the last year though all data will be kept for about two years (in order to have the chance to look further back in time and compare).

Currently supported data-sources are traffic (local and via SNMP), system's properties like processes/memory/users/loadavg, hdd usage, hdd throughput, ping-times, lm_sensors, #of running copies of given applications, distributed.net statistics, worm-impacts (by analyzing apache-logfiles), APC-USV statistics (load/temperature/charge..), connections to shoutcast streams.

More modules are to come on users' requests and ideas. I recently started adding some tools for debugging and to generate alarm-reports (for example if a given threshold is exceeded) which may be mailed to the system's admins.

Requirements:
Tobias Oetiker's "rrdtool" is needed to let this script work. It is used to manage the databases and generate the graphics. At this point i would like to congratulate Tobi, he did a very good job writing this magnificent tool!

Since I mainly use Perl5 to sample the data and update the databases, of course this has to be installed on your system. But this should not be an issue since most systems already come with full Perl5 support. But please be sure to install the perl-libraries of "rrdtool" using "make site-perl-install" afer you install "rrdtool."

"convert" from the "ImageMagick" package has to be installed to get full functionality.

"iptables" or "ipchains" has to be installed if you want to use the "network" module. Maybe you have to build a new kernel which has the corrosponding firewalling capabilities (packet filter)