[plug] ANNOUNCMENT - MEETING: 14/May/2002 Central TAFE

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

Hello All.
	Just a quick announcement for the May talk at TAFE.  This month we have
Mike Selig, Director of Architecture - Functional Software Pty Ltd.  Giving
us first bash at his AUUG talk for this year.

Here is the abstract.
------------------------
System Monitoring - much more than red and green

    Michael Selig
    Director of Architecture
    Functional Software Pty Ltd
 
Most commercial data centres these days provide services that are
critical to the day-to-day functioning of their entire organisation.
These services and the infrastructure supporting them (hardware,
operating system, database etc) should be monitored to ensure that
everything is "healthy".
 
Like a monitor connected to a human in hospital, the doctor is interested
in more than simply "alive" or "dead". The data returned by the monitor,
and the changes in this data over time are an important aid in diagnosis
and prediction of future problems.
 
I suggest that System Monitoring should centre around data collection,
and using this data to detect events in a smart, state-based way. It is
then straightforward to tie things like notifying users about problems
and taking remedial action to each state. You can also use the collected
data for reporting, and to determine whether Service Levels are being
met.
 
In this presentation I shall describe the System Monitoring architecture
that we implemented at Functional Software, and explain some of the
important design decisions that were made to enable such a product to be
implemented by an R&D team of only 3 people. For those who are
interested, I shall have a copy of Functional Software's product,
"sentinel3G" running on a Linux notebook.
------------------------

If you have Linux boxes that you would like (or need) to monitor for system
health then this will be an interesting talk.  Recently SAGE-AU had a similar
talk presentEd by Alan Main.  teh SAGE talk focused more on the application
(sentinel3G), this talk is focused more on the theories behind the
application.

Yours Tony.

/*
 * "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the 
 * same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
 * --Albert Einstein
 */