Spong Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Spong?

• 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

2. Why doesn't my spong-client status update show up on the spong-server

The spong-server has a bit of security for status update messages. The host name in the status message must match a host name defined in the spong.hosts files. spong-client uses the gethostbyname() function to try to resolve the host's full name. If it just gets the host name without the domain, spong-server will quietly reject and drop the message.

You can run the perl snippet below to determine what host name that spong-client is resolving for the machine it is running on.

perl -MSys::Hostname -e '$h = (gethostbyname(Sys::Hostname::hostname()))[0]; print "$h\n"'

It should print out you the fully qualified domain name of your system. This should match the hostname configured in the song.hosts file on the spong-server macine. If they don't match then you can do 1 of 2 things.  In your hosts file make use that the full domain name is the first name of your host's line. i.e.

192.168.2.34  my-host.inkcom.com my-host

Or put if your system is in your DNS server properly, make sure that 'dns' is in front of 'file' on the hosts: line of the /etc/nsswitch.conf file.

There a utility gethost-test in the /utils directory of the Spong distribution. You can run it on a machine to make sure that it is setup correctly to resolve it's full quality domain name. The utility is run by enter the following command  'perl gethost-test'.

3. How do I get e-mail/paging/alpha paging/notifications to work?

If your are still having problems, follow the check list below to help resolve your problem.
 

1. In spong.conf make sure the $SEND_MESSAGE is set to 'RED', 'CHANGE' or 'RED-CHANGE'.

 
2. .In spong.mesage make sure that $RULES_MATCH is set to 'ALL' or 'FIRST-MATCH'.

If you set it to 'OLD', spong-message will revert to an old notification method.
 
3.  If your are having problems with defining your rules, put in a very minimal rules set.

   $MESSAGING_RULES = [
                         {
                            contacts => [ 'sjohnson' ]
                         },
                      ];

This will send everything to the 'sjohnson' contact.
 

4. In spong.hosts, you must define at least one contact (the %HUMANS in spong.hosts) in order to have any notifications sent. for the example rule setup above, to get e-mail sent to that user you can have an entry like:



   %HUMANS = (
      'sjohnson' => {
                      name => 'Stephen Johnson',
                      email => 'stephen.johnson@mailhost.at.my.com',
                    },
   );



5. And you can test your $MESSAGING_RULES defined in spong.message, your can run spong-message in debugging mode to see what is happening step by step:

spong-message --debug red hostname.my.com disk 98765432 'This is a test'




This will generate a lot of verbose output. you might want to redirect it to to a file. spong-message counts rules starting with 0 just to be forewarned.

AUTHOR

Based on code/ideas from Sean MacGuire (BB), and Helen Harrison (Pong).