Pong3

The as-yet-unnamed System Monitoring Tool

Release Version 1.00 Released January 7, 1999


There is now a mailing list for discussing development of the Pong3 project. To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@megacity.org with, in the body:
subscribe pong3
You will receive a confirmation notice, and after returning that as the instructions tell you, you'll be signed up, and will receive updates and information about upcoming changes and enhancements to the Pong3 project.

I have to admit, its been over a year since the last release of Pong3 and its almost completely Yahoo's fault. :) I've been busy working my ass off, and haven't had time to update the code or anything like that. If anyone is looking to submit patches, etc. etc., let me know and I'll try to make sure you have what you need to do it. I've been kicking around a lot of ideas for v2.0, but have yet to be able to really think about good ways of incorporating them. (SNMP gathering, responding to SNMP alerts, parallel gathering vs. serial gathering of data, to name a few).

Pong3 was conceived in the fall of 1997 by employees of SpeedChoice, a wireless internet service provider, after having experimented both with Big Brother and a package called SPong (Son of Pong). [this package is where Pong3 gets its temporary name, as the Son of Son of Pong, or Pong3, although this is just a temporary title].

Big Brother and SPong both served a very critical function in that they allowed remote monitoring of system services from a central location. The problem discovered was they did not appear to scale very well, and this would cause problems as we wanted to monitor more and more services on more and more machines.

One other challenge we decided to focus on was that IF we were going to redesign the monitoring software so that it would be more scalable, then we ALSO wanted the remote machines to report statistical data as well, for use with MRTG. (Multi Router Traffic Grapher, a utility for graphing statistics over time).

Enter Pong3.

To see a sample of what Pong3's "monitoring screen" looks like, click here.

Pong3 is capable of monitoring:

  • POP-3 Server Status
  • SMTP Server Status
  • HTTP Server Status
  • HTTP Proxy Server Status
  • Hostname Resolution
  • Drive Space Availability
  • Free Memory (in testing)
  • News Server Status
  • CPU Load
  • Connectivity (by pinging host)
  • SSH Daemon Status
  • Telnet Daemon Status
  • IMAP Server Status
  • FTP Server Status

Other services are VERY easy to add, (and in fact if I've missed your favorite, let me know, and I'll see what I can do about getting it in there).

In addition, when combined with MRTG, the client is also capable of allowing you to graph:

  • Web Server Usage - in Hits per 5 Minute Period
  • Web Server Usage - in Bytes per Second
  • Web Server Usage - in Total Bytes over 5 Minute Period
  • FTP Throughput between the host and another designated host
  • Mail Server Usage - In Bytes Processed Over 5 Minute Period
  • Mail Server Usage - In Number of Messages Processed over 5 Minute Period
  • Name Server Requests
  • Mail Spool Size - Reports largest spool and average spool size
  • Mail Spool Size - Reports largest spool and total spool usage
  • Drive Space Availability
  • Free Memory (in testing)
  • CPU Load

To download the current version of Pong3 (version 1.00) , click Here. Detailed installation instructions are included within the tarfile. The installation assumes that you have a complete version of Perl 5, including all "normally included modules and packages".

If you find you are missing any, may we suggest either (a) getting the current copy of Perl from here. If you only want to upgrade modules, those can be found at CPAN

Bug Reports should be sent to the author, Derek Balling (dredd@megacity.org). Please keep in mind that this is still very much in the alpha stage, so I'll try to get to your report as soon as I can.

This product is free, and is released under the GNU Public License. All the author asks is that you drop him a note to let him know that you have tried it or are using it, and what degree of success you've had with it, so I know whether or not my work is in vain. *grin*