bcnu is a web application that facilitates system management.
One of the advantages of using bcnu is that it uses a web browser to display the data about the hosts in a tabular form. Also, it features colored icons that indicate the status of monitored conditions, and you can click on them to access more detailed information about the state of the system.
Additionally, historical data is stored indefinitely, and a powerful query tool can be used to extract it. Furthermore, bcnu is managed from a central UNIX system, and it can distribute all agents, scripts, and config files from one point, using the supplied shell scripts. In the near future, it will even be possible to configure agents from a web browser.
Furthermore, bcnu has a highly adaptable architecture. The agents are currently based on Bourne shell scripts, but they can be any program. Moreover, a set of standard shell functions make it easy to interface with bcnu, and it's simple to modify existing scripts to talk to bcnu. Consequently, all the benefits of bcnu agents, such as logging, resending, proxy, etc., can easily be integrated into new scripts. Finally, the developers welcome agents contributed by users to include them with the distribution.
Another great feature of bcnu is that it is straightforward to implement. By default, it makes minimal impact on the managed system, and logging levels can be set up separately for each agent. You can also distribute monitoring of network devices over multiple machines, and each may have different checking and logging intervals. For example, you may wish to check all web servers every 5 minutes, application servers every 10 minutes, but mail or print servers only every 30 minutes.
In summary, here are some of the key features of bcnu: easy-to-use, simple agent-based monitoring with flexible thresholds, multiple views of the same information, agent scheduler for total flexibility, automatic logging and resend of messages, discover agent option to build a complete map of your system automatically, built-in web server for static pages, powerful cgi access to data with multiple views and historical queries, and it's free! (distributed under the terms of the Artistic license).
In terms of standard agents, bcnu includes network monitor, ping, http, ftp, mail, lpd, Oracle, etc. It also has intelligent log file scanning for messages and warnings, checking for required running processes, filesystem mount status and space usage, processor/memory usage, and system uptime. Furthermore, special agents include volume management checks for Solaris, AIX, and HPUX, and system availability monitoring. Additionally, admin agents include logging and resending of agent data, agent proxy, alerts sent by mail, pager, win32popup, web, Perl/TK window, or custom program, report of all errors and warnings, self-monitoring, and alerting agents (runs on another system), discovery of systems to be managed, and optional static web page built to show status of all systems.
Finally, in the latest update, the setup utility has been improved to make installation easier; the information display in the log, vmgt, fs, and procs agents was enhanced, new contributed agents were added
Version 1.22: N/A