Managing Computer Health in Multiple Places

I have a few computers under my control. Unfortunately, not all of them are in the same room. Actually, most are spread all around the country. I have essentially two computers under my direct control, with a few others that I tend to use.

It becomes very important when you start needing these computers to do tasks, such as serve up websites, provide SSH servers, or other such services. Unfortunately, power interruptions, and crashes do happen. A lot of times, if a server goes down, you need to wait until you can get somebody to physically press the button if it’s remote, or provide some details on network access (did just the network go down, or did the actual computer go down, or both). Collecting information about a server after it has gone down is a trivial task, just look through the logs. The big crunch here is, what about real-time outage information? Having a server “ping” a webpage every 5 minutes, uploading the latest load average, memory information, disk usage, uptime, and system log information should provide adequate information to provide a decent report on system health.

Over the weekend, I want to see if I can write some code and set up a little site where I can monitor all my computers, and maybe even try and send commands to them (security and authentication being somewhat of a problem here).

Update: I started work on this on the weekend, and I already have it working. Visit data.vectec.net/uptime for live uptime information for three of my Linux computers (Mac OSX coming soon I hope).