Keywatch
Overview
Keywatch is a free, open source monitoring system that aims to provide the adaptability of a modern monitoring system without being complex or hard to configure.
Keywatch runs on Windows and Linux. The server runs Java and OSGi and the client technology is based on Google Web Toolkit, an Ajax technology requiring only a standard web browser. The system also provides an optional Perl based agent system for monitoring remote applications and hosts. The system can be extended with new types of agents, written in other languages and platforms.
Keywatch provides a plugin mechanism for all parts of the system monitoring value chain:
- Widgets can be Plugged In to offer new ways to visualize status and to interact with the user
- Rules and filters can be plugged in to compute status based on collected events, perform maintenance tasks and filter unwanted events
- Entirely new server-side functionality can be plugged in for use by widgets and other plugins
- Remote agents can be extended by adding scripts or completely new collection systems.
Detailed features
Keywatch is built partly using its own plugin mechanism. In such, there is a core system with basic functionality and there are plugins that provides additional value. In the provided core system, the following features are implemented:
- Event management allowing the server to receive events from collection systems. This includes typical CRUD operations.
- GUI framework based on Google's web toolkit (GWT). The frameworks manages presentation of widgets that can be plugged into the system
- Use any mainstream database to store events
- User management
- Plugin management for server components using the OSGI plugin mechanism
- GUI build system - allowing to build new GUI components runtime
- Monitoring plugins in the standard distribution:
- XML-RPC based collection system - Allowing probes or agents to send events into the system using the web service protocol
- Perl-based agent system - running scripts on distant host using a perl agent that sends in events using the XML-RPC collection system
- Hoststatus plugin Providing status overview per host.
- Agent control to start and stop scripts on agents in the Perl based agent system
- Event list and event details