Argus

Fox's Pages

Updated: June 27, 2006

Argus

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UNIX networks have hundreds of daemons, data servers, and other unconnected processes that must be constantly running. In addition there are more general network services that have to be monitored. Is sendmail delivering mail? Are the web servers serving web pages? That's where Argus comes in.

Argus is a UNIX X11 client program that watches all the daemons on all the machines and alerts operator whenever something is amiss. Help text accompanying the alert messages explains how to fix any problem that may occur.

Above is a sample Argus window, an X11 client. Each monitored service appears as a label, below which are color indicators that show the status of that service on many different hosts. The display appears simple and takes up little real estate on the screen, but there are actually four hundred and ten indicators on that little window! The thin red line in "XHM_HOSTS" indicates a problem with one of the systems. Generally green means the corresponding server is OK. Other colors mean not so well. White means the server is "out of service" and is not actually being monitored. In cases where the status represents an urgent condition a status popup will appear that shows what's wrong with the daemon. Here is an example of that status message.

You normally have a small, solid green panel indicating all is well. When something bad happens you see an obvious popup that shows the problem and explains what might be wrong and how you can fix it. Here is an example of the help text for a server.

More information:

Jim Fox
UW Technology
Identity and Access Management
University of Washington
fox@washington.edu