If you’re a system administrator, with crazy demands on your time, you need all the help you can get. If your organization’s budget doesn’t allow for extra colleagues, often you can get some help from software. For instance, consider Checksuite, a suite of nine Perl programs that can assist Linux system administrators with daily tasks. You can use it to monitor resources and security aspects of a system.
Checksuite monitors CPU load, disk utilization, possible hardware errors, broken symbolic links, memory swap, and several other system items. You can have it notify you via e-mail with verbose output, or notify you via cell phone with brief output – or both. It can also create individual log files or output directly to the screen if you run one of the programs manually.
Checksuite started out as a single Perl script called checkload.pl in March 2003 when administrator Larry Long was managing hundreds of Linux servers. “Many of the systems would have issues with CPUs being pegged,” he says, “so I decided to create a script that would e-mail me whenever the CPU load hit a certain threshold and give me a snapshot of the processes running that seemed to be hogging most of the system. From there, I added many other things to monitor that I formerly had to check manually. I took a five-year hiatus from working on it, but recently decided to pick it back up due to popular demand and the fact that I missed working on it.”
Long says Checksuite is not meant to compete with enterprise monitoring systems like Nagios or Hobbit. Rather, it’s for admins who want to install something quick and easy with few prerequisites. Long says the software is also easy to customize, and admins can use only the specific parts of the suite that will benefit them.
Long says he began developing the suite in Perl because “at the time, I was trying to become a better Perl programmer. When I decided to release Checksuite on SourceForge.net, I considered rewriting it in bash or C. I decided Perl was still the best method for me because of the available modules and the fact that any modifications made to each program did not require constant recompiling. I wanted to make it easy for other people to modify it as well as for me.”
Long provides a full manual in the software package, and recommends reading it in order to get the most out of the software. Users can also view the crontab configuration to see what default options are passed to each individual program.
Long plans to make future versions of Checksuite less Linux-specific and more compatible with other flavors of Unix, and hopes to make some of the programs even more configurable with a global configuration process. And while the suite is currently available as a tarball and an RPM/SRPM binary, Long wants to add binaries for Debian and Debian-based distributions too. If you’d like to help recommend or implement code changes or additional resources to monitor, you can reach him via the e-mail address on the project page.