Managing IMAP

Monitoring and Testing Tools

So, now that you’ve brought up your load-balanced, SQL-authenticated, awesome-performing IMAP server (at least you think it’s awesome-performing), it would probably be good if you could back up your claims of near-permanent uptime and blazing performance with more than anecdotal tales of how well it works for you and the handful of users you’ve polled since the last upgrade. That’s where monitoring and testing tools come in. They take system performance (which you and your users understand) and turn it into numbers (which “the suits” understand) and outage notifications (which you and your operations center understand). Refer to Chapter 16, Server Performance Tuning , for more on performance monitoring.

SMT

Authors

Brian Hill and Joel Loudermilk

URL

http://www.doodlabs.com/smt/smt-1.05.tar.gz

Major features

Monitors IMAP, POP, SMTP, DNS, and HTTP services and notifies a user if a service is down.

Installation

Typical GNU-type software installation.

Documentation

General features are documented at http://www.doodlabs.com/smt/, and specifics are documented in manpages included in the SMT distribution.

Status

Current version is 1.05 as of February 2000.

Licensing

GNU General Public License.

SMT is a daemon that tests a service, such as IMAP or SMTP, by executing a test program. There are prebuilt tests included with SMT that monitor IMAP, POP3, SMTP, DNS, and HTTP. SMT can also run a user-defined test—anything goes, as long as it can be run from ...