What's ESM?

ESM (Extensible System Monitor) is a program that lets you tie together plugins to monitor your system. For instance if you want to be emailed whenever a harddrive fails you could use the included ESMSysLog monitor and it will notify you of any emerg syslog messages, such as a harddrive failure. If you then decide you also want to know if TripWire detects anything you can use another monitor that reports on TripWire. If you want to know if the load on your system suddenly goes up you can do that too. ESM will get the results of all of these monitors, make a system report and then send that report with a sender. All of this is done automatically, so you can get some work done.

Writing plugins for ESM is very easy. All a plugin is is just any executable program that communicates with ESM via standard input and output. You can make a plugin with just about anything, shell scripts, perl programs, c, c++ etc.

ESM is free software under the GPL licence.

What's new in version 1.1

• New Features:
  • Configuration files now go in /usr/local/esm/etc
  • You can now specify priorities by name. For instance instead of 8 you can say emerg
  • ESMSysLog can now do regular expression matching of syslog messages.
  • Added the ESMPing dmonitor.
  • Renamed the esmconfig config file esm.conf
• Bug Fixes:
  • Lots of code cleanups.
  • One possible security hole has been fixed. I think I wasn't handling temp files correctly, could someone please look at this?
  • Now all dmonitors are properly killed before esmd shuts down.
  • Should work on non-GNU/Linux systems now.

What does ESM need to run?

Any POSIX compatible system should work.

What makes ESM different/better then mon?

ESM is a much simpler program to use then mon. For more complex tasks though mon is far more powerfull. On the other hand mon doesn't use standard GNU autoconf/automake installation and may be harder to install and configure then ESM. It cirtainly was for me.

Sounds mighty usefull. Where can I get it?

Version 1.1 is available here. A PGP signature is available here. You can verify it with my public key.

Any plugins available?

A send-by-email sender, mailreport, a syslog monitor, ESMSysLog and a monitor that checks if a computer is running, ESMPing, is included with the package. However if you make one please email me if you feel like sharing it.

Awards

ESM won the DaveCentral Linux Software Archive Best of Linux Award on May 23 2000

How to Contact the Author

If you need to contact me (Peter Todd) my email is pete(at)petertodd.ca I also have a website, retep.tripod.com

Technical support, bug tracking and the public forums for ESM can be found at the ESM Project Page

_{© 2000 Peter Todd
Site created on Sept 13 1999 Last update - June 14 2000}