Unix® System Management Primer Plus

Service Monitoring

During the Internet boom in the late 1990s, an increasing number of companies began offering clients services such as email, dial-up services, and news feeds. In this environment, no system administrator could be content with determining that the company's servers were up and running; the more important question to ask was if the company's services were up and running. As a system administrator today, your system monitoring routine must include service monitoring.

The most significant benefit of service monitoring is its proactive nature; it probes for potential failures, rather than waiting for them to happen. Naturally, some services fail without warning, so some service monitoring is reactive. But in optimum circumstances, ...