Questions - Features

[Jeff Weisberg]

| > - support for remote agent running on various platforms which return 
| > information like: state, service, message
| 
| SNMP is a universal 'agent'.  I dont know of any other specifically
| written agents, but Argus will easily accommodate anything you can throw
| at it.


SNMP is the preferred remote agent. most SNMP servers can be configured
to report on disk use, processes, or run your own program.

argus also comes with a 'argus-agent' which can be run out
of inetd on remote machines to monitor disk use, cpu load, etc,
for people who for some reason don't want to use SNMP.


| We've requested a 'warning', but Argus' author is taking an "I dont know
| how to do it because I'm not that good" approach.

huh? requested what? do you mean something like:
	severity: warning


| > - same colour/event scheme as big brother. (colour for no data, red for 
| > alert, yellow for warning, colour for stale data) Also have color icons 
| > with a twist, for acknowledged alarms, or other special events. This 
| > makes it easy to see that someone is working on a problem.

definitely not. argus has no animated spinning icons.
argus does not have a disgusting jelly-bean-vomit color scheme.
just a simple clean look.

the author considers this a feature.


| > To win over people and developpers you need to support user hooks: 
| > Ability to create your own services checks, external actions, support 
| > for third party agents. A monitoring platform should be able to leverage 
| > external utilities and also *be* leveraged by external utilities. No 
| > system is in a vaccum.
| 
| it's clear you havent even tried Argus :) Argus is a good thing.
| 
| Argus plays well with external utilities.  Provided, is an 'argusctl'
| program, which lets external utilities play with Argus.

it is also trivial to run any program as a service test.


	--jeff