[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Alex Aminoff]

Hi folks. I need a better monitoring system. I currently use something I 
wrote 10 years ago using parts of Spong and other bits.

I looked at Nagios, which seems to be the most commonly mentioned thing 
today. The configuration files are not easily hand-editable. This would 
be OK if there were decent tools to spit them out, but a day of hacking 
did not find anything simple to install and use.

What I need is something so simple I could write it myself from scratch 
in a couple days if I had a couple days. I don't want SNMP or any sort 
of agent on the client to be monitored (in my case I'm monitoring my 
customers' machines) - I just want remote network checks: does it ping, 
is port 80 responding, that sort of thing. I would like the 
configuration file to be as simple as possible: definitely no XML, and 
preferably few parentheses. In fact, how about if my config file is DNS? 
Start with pinging everything in my domain, if there is an MX record 
pointing to it check SNMP, if "www" points to it check port 80. For 
exceptions to that general case, have a config file.

I like BigBrother's config file, but BB's implementation is a snarl of 
shell script that does not do a good job of producing transparent error 
messages when things are not exactly right. At least for the 
non-commercial version, which does not appear to be maintained. And BB 
has agents on the clients too.

Or perhaps I should just run nmap on my network every 10 minutes and 
alert me if there is a diff from the previous results. Prone to false 
positives I would think.

  - Alex