Remstats was written by
  Thomas Erskine at the
  CRC in Canada and now
  at SourceWorks.

These tools are intended to help you build the hosts part of your configuration file. They take a file (or files) of hostnames and emit (or update) host config-files for them. There are currently no config generators for the log-collector, the remoteping-collector.

• make-ping-hosts

  Supply it with a file (or files) named for the group you want to put the hosts in and it will generate minimal host config-files for each of the hosts. If the file has a '_' in the name, the group name used will have spaces substituted for the '_'s.

• make-port-hosts

  Supply it with a file of hostnames and it will do a very limited port-scan to find which services seem to be running on those hosts and generate the appropriate rrd lines invoking the port-collector.

• make-snmp-hosts

  Supply it with a file of hostnames and it will spit out host config-files and rrd lines invoking the snmp-collector.

• check-config

  As you might suspect, it does a basic check on the config file. It also does two other things: first, it creates any missing directories, so the other scripts won't complain, and second, it pulls out some config information so that the shell-scripts don't have to parse the config file. The run-remstats script runs it first, to make sure the config file is ok, but it's also a good idea to run it yourself when you change the config file, just to make sure it's still valid.

• snmp-showif

  Shows some basic SNMP interface information, so you can decide which interfaces to monitor.

• alert.cgi

  Shows the current alert status of selected rrd variables.

• dataimage.cgi

  Generates images based on live data.

• datapage.cgi

  Generates web-pages containing dynamic data.

• ping.cgi

  Ping the host.

• showlog.cgi

  display selected portions of the remstats log files.

• traceroute.cgi

  Invoke traceroute and find out how your packets are getting to the host. The traceroute output is slightly massaged to provide links to look up various things.

• whois.cgi

  The traceroute.cgi script makes links to this to look up ASNs and IP numbers.

To check that the configuration file is syntactically valid, and to create any missing directories, you can run check-config.

remstats also supplies a collection of shell-scripts to invoke a specific sequence of programs. Many of them simply invoke a collector, run its output through updater Those are: do-log, do-ping, do-port, do-remoteping, do-snmp and do-unix-status.

alert-email is triggered by the alert-monitor to send email when a problem is detected. You can have your own alert mechanism if you want; look at the alert-monitor docs.

The final script is do-remstats, which is what you usually run out of crontab to do "everything". It also runs graph-writer and the rest of the pagemakers.

• rrd-report

  This makes simple reports on data in an RRD. It's not tied into remstats in any way and should run fine on its own.