Unleashing the power of M3 & timers

During the lifespan of M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) there has always been something lacking – timers.

M3 execution procedure was outlined in this previous article.

The execution mentioned in the latter was a one-time-execution, whereas server monitoring requires periodic invocation of monitors in order to actually provide counters over time, graphing performance.

The periodic invocation method suggested up until today was to integrate M3 with crontab.

Crontab, in a nutshell, is a Linux/Unix service for periodic invocation of executables. Implementing M3 with crontab properly meant M3 would run every X minutes, producing a Monitis counter update every X minutes, should everything run properly.

In the following article I’ll outline the changes done to support timers in M3.

Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) framework usage and examples were outlined in a few previous articles:
M3 – introduction
Planning your vacation / HTTP extraction
However we’ve never explained the bits and bytes behind it and what was the initial motivation for implementing it.
This article will outline the motivation, design, implementation and perhaps also the future road map for M3.
Rereading my previous articles I realized that I generated a somewhat steep learning curve for using M3 with the complex examples provided, just because M3 can handle these complex scenarios.
However M3 was created in order to simplify things. I’m going to use an extremely simple example in the following article to explain the way M3 works this time, I promise!

Here at Monitis, we can’t help ourselves when it comes to improving and enhancing our products. We want our monitoring tools to constantly become more perfect than they are. That’s why we’re always posting about different or new ways to use Monitis — or adding new features.

This post is about the latest new feature we’re adding Monitis Agent Installer for Linux platforms — supported by Monitis Perl library v0.9.

In a recent blog post, we announced the Perl interface for Monitis API, a simple way to access our API through Perl, which is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to take care of some administrative IT tasks via the Perl library — which includes two sample scripts that allow you to create, list and delete subaccounts right from the following command line: create_subaccount.pl and delete_subaccount.pl.

A rabbit?

Writing custom monitors for Monitis is easy. On monitisexchange you can find many examples for custom monitors. However, now I bring you a surprise.

It is only rarely after I write a piece of code and represent it to others that I feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. On this occasion – there is something even better than a rabbit!

I’m proud to present you this time with ‘Monitis Monitor Manager‘, or M3 (M³) in short.