David G. Andersen Consulting

About Autostatus

News and Changes

  • Aug 2000: Autostatus 1.2.1 is out, fixing a few small bugs.
    (Eliminates unnecessary tcpchecks, threshhold specifier bug, adds browser refresh). Thanks to Stefan Brandl and Vogel for patches.
  • May 2000: Autostatus is now available on SourceForge If you want the developer version, please grab it from the sourceforge CVS repository.
  • Old News and complete CHANGELOG

    Features

    Autostatus is a network and server monitoring program. It is designed to support large, arbitrarily complex networks of computers, and still provide feedback in a very timely fashion. To that extent, it has the following goals:

    Autostatus has some features which make it fairly unique among network monitoring programs:

    Dependency Resolution

    Autostatus can be given information about the path it takes to reach network segments, or other dependencies in network or server topology. Given this dependency information, autostatus will then query for status in the proper order in order to guarantee that:

    • Nothing is queried before all of the items upon which it depends have already been queried.
    • Nothing is queried if an item upon which it depends is down.
    • Items are not incorrectly marked as down when they are simply unreachable due to a dependency failure.

    This dependency resolution is, of course, fully recursive. The software will also warn about abnormal conditions in the configuration file such as cyclical dependencies.

    Parallel status gathering
    Autostatus uses the excellent fping program written by Roland J. Schemers III at Stanford University. (see the fping copyright below). By intelligently grouping services together for parallel testing, Autostatus minimizes the amount of time necessary to scan large numbers of networks or servers.

    For testing TCP services, Autostatus uses a component called tcpcheck to perform parallel checks of TCP connections. tcpcheck was developed specifically for Autostatus, but has considerable utility outside of Autostatus.

    Status Web Page
    Autostatus automatically generates a status web page which reflects the current-known network and server status on a per-item basis.
    Email notification
    Autostatus sends email when the state of a monitored item changes (based upon configurable thresholds). Using an email to pager program (such as hellpage, by the author, or various other paging programs), it is very easy to route notifications for each service to the correct party.
    Multiple service monitoring
    Autostatus can monitor both routers/hosts via ICMP messages, and specific services on machines via TCP connections. In keeping with the themes of autostatus, TCP connections may be avoided if the machine is not reachable via ICMP, or may be tried at all times.


    Sample Output


    Availability

    Autostatus is available for free. You can download it in tar/gzipped format
    Old versions Version 1.0 and Version 1.1 are still available, but I strongly suggest using the most recent version.

    David G. Andersen also offers autostatus setup via a a consulting arrangement with the author. The price for a typical installation (including setup, testing, and one month monitoring) is $400, but varies with the complexity and organization of the network, and the features required.

    Contributors

    Several people have contributed to the development of Autostatus. The program wouldn't be where it is without them.

    Legal stuff

    This software makes use of fping.c, which was created at Stanford University. The fping copyright is included with all installations of Autostatus.

    Last updated: Sat Mar 12 12:59:07 MST 2011 [validate xhtml]

    dga - at - pobox dot com.