Pong: A Flexible Network Services Monitoring System
Helen E. Harrison, Mike C. Mitchell, and Michael E. Shaddock
SAS Institute, Inc.
Abstract
In distributed computing environments it is important to determine not
only whether individual critical machines are up or down, but also
whether the individual services they offer are available. Our site
was using a network monitoring package which used ICMP ECHO packets to
determine when individual network components were unavailable. We
found that there were many occasions where a server would reply to the
ICMP ECHO, but would still not be providing the services it should be
providing. We needed a tool which would let us monitor high level
services such as AFS or NFS file service. This paper will describe a
tool called pong which was developed to meet these needs. Pong is a
highly configurable monitoring tool which ``pings'' individual
services at predefined intervals and executes appropriate actions when
the state of that service changes. We use pong to monitor three or
more services on each of 110 servers.
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