Spong - Systems and Network Montoring Copyright © 1997-2003 Stephen L Johnson

News

09/30/2005	Spong 2.8.0-beta 2 released The installer is fixed now along with a few other minor problems.
09/28/2005	Spong 2.8.0-beta 1 released There are many new plugins and bugfixes, please test it!
06/18/2002	Miscellaneous news - To paraphase a famous Monty Python line... Spong is not quite dead yet. And two other minor bits of news. New Revamped Demo Site I've moved and updates the Spong Demo Server. It's new running on a new and faster machines. And I've added some new nodes that have been added to my home network. You can click on the Demo link above, or click on link. A new release of Spong is coming soon. The usual round of bug fixes will be in there along with some minor issues that have been around for awhile. The program startup sequence has been changed and improved. All error checking is done before the program becomes daemons. So error message appear on the console rather than log files after the programs exit. The other improvements/fixes is to the Spong Acknowledgement feature. A drop down box has been for the Ack Length/Ending field. The new feature is individual and global include/exclude status/color filter have been added into spong-message.
06/06/2002	Spong 2.7.6 is now available for downloading. The Release and Change notes are available on the Files page of the Spong Project Page at SourceForce. This is really old news but the current version of actually 2.7.7. Not much new on this release more bug fixes. Biggest change is pre data and post data plugins in the Spong Server. The replaces the older data plug facility. The pre plugins run before the Server processes a status message, and post plugins are run after the Server processes a message. And modules are run on name order. This allows plugin precidence.

What is Spong?

Spong is a simple systems and network monitoring package. It does not compete with Tivoli, OpenView, UniCenter, or any other commercial packages. It is not SNMP based, it communcates via simple TCP based messages. It is written in Perl. It can currently run on every major Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

Feaures

• client based monitoring (CPU, disk, processes, logs, etc.)
• monitoring of network services (smtp, http, ping, pop, dns, etc.)
• grouping of hosts (routers, servers, workstations, PCs)
• rules based messaging when problems occur
• configurable on a host by host basis
• results displayed via text or web based interface
• history of problems
• verbose information to help diagnosis problems
• modular programs to makes it easy to add or replace check functions or features
• Big Brother BBSERVER emulation to allow Big Brother Clients to be used

Sample Spong Setup

This is my development Spong setup on my home network. It is Spong version 2.7. There are a lot of new features that have been added since verson 2.6f. But if you click on the "Hosts" Link in the top frame, you will get a good feel of how Spong 2.6f looks and works.

License

Spong is free software issued released under the GNU General Public License or the Perl Artistic License. You may choice whichever license is appropriate for your usage.

Documentation

Don't let the amount of documentation scare you, I still think spong is simple to setup and use.

Documenation for Spong is included with evey release. For version 2.6f, the doucmentation is in HTML format located in the www/docs/ dirctory and is self contained (the links will still work if you move it), so you should be able to copy it to whatever location that you want. An online copy of the documentation is available here.

The documentation for Spong 2.7. is not complete. It is under going a complete rewrite into POD formation. This change will enable the doucmenation to converted into a multitude of different formats (i.e. HTML, man, text, etc.).