System Monitoring and Server Statistic Software

This article started off as a brain-dump by Wen Hao Chuang. Hopefully more people will contribute to this article in the near future.

The Webalizer The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.

Nagios Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Munin Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

nmon The nmon tool is designed for AIX and Linux performance specialists to use for monitoring and analyzing performance data.

awstats AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

[1] GISMO is a graphical interactive monitoring tool that provides useful visualization of students' activities in online courses to instructors. With GISMO instructors can examine various aspects of distance students, such as the attendance to courses, reading of materials, submission of assignments. Users of the popular learning management system Moodle may benefit from GISMO for their teaching activities. With respect to the standard reports provided by Moodle (which basically allow teachers to see if an individual student has viewed a specific resource or participated on a specific activity on a specific day), GISMO provides comprehensive visualizations that gives an overview of the whole class, not only a specific student or a particular resource. With GISMO, instructors can perform analysis of the whole class, and may have a "clear picture" of what the class is doing, or has done in a period in the past. GISMO is available for Moodle 1.9.x. and Moodle 2.x.