What is the best Linux comand line server monitoring tool [closed]

Question

I have a desktop at my house that has a SSH shell running htop that i use to keep an eye on my remote server.

Do you know of any other tools that run in a shell that give more of an overview of the general server?

Which maybe monitors online users, mysql, email etc...

Answer 1

That kind of monitoring may be better handled by a daemon type process such as Munin or Nagios. These can provide alerts when things begin to go wrong, and don't require someone to always look at them. Both the above tools use a web interface for montoring. Munin provides good graphical history out of the box.

From the command line, there are a variety of tools. I not aware of any swiss army knife monitors of the kind you are looking for. The various tools you have all have commands which will give you the information you want, but not in a merged format. uptime, mailq, mysqladm and others will give you pieces. You could script a monitor which runs all of command tools, and loops with some sort of timeout. However, I believe you would be better off with Munin.

Answer 2

dstat doesn't do all of that, but what it does, it does well.

Answer 3

I use nmon for network/disk io/memory information at home (as my home server is an old netbook and as such does not have the resources to run nagios and/or cacti).

If you have a bit more resources, nagios + cacti could be a good choice.

Answer 4

Although I'm unaware of a single cli based program that will provide all the information you requested, there are dozens of tools that can give you a good idea as to the state of the server. Some of the more common of these are: ps (try ps auxf), top (sort running processes by their cpu usage, memory usage, running time etc), netstat (try netstat -taunp), w (see who is logged in and what they're doing).

For more interesting hardware monitoring, on Ubuntu you can use the sysstat package to provide commands such as mpstat (cpu), iostat (disk), vmstat (memory) information for monitoring physical hardware.

Finally, there are a number of tools available which allow you to setup a web interface to perform monitoring of your server which can provide data you are specifically interested in (CPU utilisation, memory usage, disk io, network io, "number of emails sent", "number of records in a particular table") using one of many monitoring tools. I'd suggest Nagios as a starting point.