SURVIVOR 0.9.7b review

SURVIVOR is yet another systems monitor. Does the world need yet another systems monitor? Well, the world has had the Backstreet B

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1048K Developer: Benn Oshrin

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SURVIVOR is yet another systems monitor.

Does the world need yet another systems monitor? Well, the world has had the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, 98 Degrees, Take That, Boyzone, Westlife, 5ive, O-Town, not to mention New Kids on the Block, All-4-One, Boyz II Men, New Edition, and Menudo, so clearly there is an ability to accept and even appreciate redundancy. Not that one needs to appreciate boy bands to appreciate systems monitoring, and perhaps now would be a good time to underscore that the SURVIVOR project does not endorse or even listen to boy bands.

Differentiating systems monitors can be a lot like differentiating boy bands. At first glance, they all look alike. With careful study, however, they all still look alike, except that some have goatees and others don't. With further study, it is possible to detect different accents, but no matter how far you look you still have a boy band.

In this respect, SURVIVOR is a lot like other systems monitors. It was written because of requirements that dictated the equivalent of a boy band with two Americans, two Brits, and an Australian, two with goatees, three brunettes, and not all of them living in the same town in Florida.

Unlike most boy bands, the core of SURVIVOR is a POSIX-thread based scheduler, responsible for determining when services should be checked and when alerts should be transmitted. The scheduler should be highly scalable, although it has not yet been tested against an entire class B network.

Like almost every other package, check and alert modules may be written in any language. These modules should generally scale quite well, although specifics depend on what the module actually does.

A command line interface, web interface, and two-way messaging gateway are provided.

Unlike most boy bands, SURVIVOR is intended to be a very high quality, feature rich, package. It is unlikely to ever get airtime on TRL.

What's New in This Release:
This release fixes a file descriptor leak, enables call list aliases to work correctly, properly parses rup output on Linux platforms, addresses an issue where modules under multithreaded Perl failed to run, and fixes several other minor bugs.